


Badlands

by StumbleineSuperqueen



Series: Badlands, etc. [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Car Sex, M/M, Shower Sex, There Is Porn In This, Which is hilarious, basically think natural born killers, because it's gonna be....very long, but i'm dying to post some of it, every sex all the sex, freddie is wayne gale, i think this makes alana scagnetti, if that wasn't clear, please do not hold your breath on the rest of this one, sex outside, where hannibal and will are mickey and mallory
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-26
Updated: 2016-10-17
Packaged: 2018-08-11 02:04:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 58,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7871377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StumbleineSuperqueen/pseuds/StumbleineSuperqueen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>THE HONEYMOON KILLERS!! EXCLUSIVE PERSONAL PHOTO FROM MURDER HUSBANDS!</p><p>BAD ROMANCE—Charlie and Caril Ann, Mickey and Mallory, Paul and Karla, and now the newest addition to our hallowed pantheon of killer lovers: Lecter and Graham.</p><p>Through an exclusive arrangement with the Murder Husbands themselves, this reporter obtained today a photograph from the personal collection of very well-preserved older man and convicted serial killer Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, 50, and sexy young fed-gone-bad lover Will Graham, 41, depicting the deadly couple sharing a loving moment in an unidentified desert location.</p><p>Keep coming back to tattlecrime.com for further exclusives!</p><p>TWs: Themes of intimate partner abuse including emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse; psychiatric abuse; homophobia; trauma including sexual trauma; mentions of sexual assault; violent and/or rough sex; voyeurism; alcoholism/drug use; mental illness including dissociation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That the murderer chose Hannibal to imitate does not surprise her. Among a certain segment fascinated with true crime, Lecter and Graham have quickly become a sort of modern-day Bonnie and Clyde: criminal lovers who chose to die together rather than live the rest of their lives apart.
> 
> As much as Alana hates to admit it, she can see the appeal. Will and Hannibal's mutual obsession had frequently confused and disturbed her, but she can still feel the crackle that would fill the air of a room they both occupied, especially towards the end. Brought together they sparked.
> 
> Something stirs in her memory and she thinks:
> 
> The road was so dimly lighted;  
> There were no highway signs to guide;  
> But they made up their minds  
> If all roads were blind,  
> They wouldn't give up till they died.

> _I can't say that_  
>  _I am sorry_  
>  _For the things that_  
>  _We done_  
>  _At least for a_  
>  _Little while, sir_  
>  _Me and her we  
>  _ _Had us some fun_
> 
> _—Bruce Springsteen, "Nebraska"_

 

Dr. Alana Bloom picks up the phone on the first ring.

"Bloom."

"Hi, baby."

"Hi." Margot.

"How's your day?"

"Fine..." Not quite true.

On the screen of her laptop is the front page of _Tattle Crime_. The top post screams _RIPPER REBORN? SURGICAL TROPHIES TAKEN FROM VICTIMS OF FLORIDA MASSACRE, POLICE SAY._

"You saw it then," Margot says.

"Yes." She doesn't have to ask what Margot's referring to.

One day ago, in Marathon, Florida, a family of five had been found dead in their home. All five had died of massive blood loss from multiple knife wounds. No cash was found in the house, and the refrigerator had been raided. The family had just concluded a cookout, and the grill was still hot.

It appeared that the killer or killers had taken the opportunity to cook the "surgical trophies" missing from the victims over the smoldering coals before departing.

It is too familiar, even with the flat notes of the food and the money. Too close. Alana is not afraid yet. She doesn't know if she can believe Will and Hannibal are still alive.

The bodies were never found, but making her peace has taken a long time, and she's in no hurry to reopen those wounds without hard proof.

The mourning had been intensely difficult. It had felt like grieving two people she had invented, had never really known at all. She wants to believe she knew them once, but it's hard to say anymore. The feelings are complicated and sour.

Alana may not be afraid, but she's very angry—at the copycat aping the Ripper's crimes. It strikes her as unspeakably tasteless to raise her friends' ghosts, not to mention those of the real Ripper's victims, for the attention of the Freddie Loundses of the world.

That the murderer chose Hannibal to imitate does not surprise her. Among a certain segment fascinated with true crime, Lecter and Graham have quickly become a sort of modern-day Bonnie and Clyde: criminal lovers who chose to die together rather than live the rest of their lives apart.

As much as Alana hates to admit it, she can see the appeal. Will and Hannibal's mutual obsession had frequently confused and disturbed her, but she can still feel the crackle that would fill the air of a room they both occupied, especially towards the end. Brought together they sparked.

Something stirs in her memory and she thinks: 

> _The road was so dimly lighted;_  
>  _There were no highway signs to guide;_  
>  _But they made up their minds  
>       If all roads were blind,  
>  They wouldn't give up till they died._

"Alana?"

"Yes, yes, um, I'm here."

"Don't think about it too much, baby, okay? Be here. This has nothing to do with you. Do your job and come home and play with your son and kiss your wife."

Alana smiles. That's exactly what she wants to do. And have a big-ass beer or three. No, no beer. _Not anymore._  Something with liquor, a gin and tonic. Watch a movie, hold Margot close, and find something to scrub Bonnie Parker's wistful sing-song words out of her head:

> _Some day they'll go down together;_  
>  _And they'll bury them side by side;_  
>  _To a few it'll be grief  
>       To the law a relief  
>  But it's death for Bonnie and Clyde._

 

Jack Crawford does not read _Tattle Crime_ now that it is no longer his job to do so. He reads the newspaper, because he has always liked reading the newspaper and he cannot stand TV news presenters. Death of print be damned.

He sees the headline as soon as he picks up the _Baltimore Sun._ He stands there on his concrete stoop and looks at it. After a moment he unfolds the paper and reads.

His expression would be hard to interpret, if anyone was trying. An observer might settle on something between incredulity and relief.

 

_Outside Will Graham's hospital room, Jack Crawford stands trying to force himself to enter. He looks at the flowers he bought in the gift shop downstairs and sighs. Finally he turns the handle._

_Will is sleeping, or knocked out on pain meds. The many machines attached to him, keeping him alive and monitoring his vitals, remind him unpleasantly of his wife. He shoves the thought from his mind and sits down, setting the flowers on the little table. Under the dressings his throat itches maddeningly and he takes a deep breath, trying to will away the urge to scratch._

_"Hello, Jack." Jack jumps, then smiles._

_"Hi, Will," he says. Will has cracked one eyelid and is returning his smile wearily. "They got you on the good drugs?"_

_"The best. I'm actually more relaxed than I've been in a long time. High as a kite." He makes a noise that's almost a laugh._

_"Good, good."_

_"Surprised to see you. Out already?"_

_Jack touches his neck. "They wanted me longer, but the only thing that will fix this now is time."_

_"Yeah." Will closes his eye. "Time."_

_The clock on the wall ticks for nearly a full rotation before they speak again, as if to underline the words._

_"I won't keep you long, I guess," Jack says, toying with his hospital wristband. "I was on my way out of here and I'm sure you need to rest."_

_"Did you get him, Jack?"_

_Silence again. "Not exactly, no."_

_Will's sigh turns into an awful pained cough. He screws up his face._

_"Do you need me to get someone?" Jack asks quickly, reaching for the button that pages the nurse._

_"No, God no," Will coughs. "Please, they're always here."_

_Jack frowns in sympathy—Will can't function without time alone—and nods as Will's coughing fit peters out. He picks up the glass of water on the bedside table and holds the straw in range of Will's mouth. Will drinks and Jack puts the cup down._

_"I'm sorry, Will," he says, and looks at his hands._

_"Don't be. You didn't do this."_

_"No, I'm..." Jack twists his hands in his lap and looks around the room as if searching for someone to help him get his words out. "I'm sorry...about...Hannibal."_

_Will looks at him. "What do you mean, Jack?" He closes his eyes and swallows painfully, then asks, "Is he dead?"_

_"No, he's very much alive. We think he left the country. Guess I should have done this official and gotten that stop on his passport."_

_"Then what are you talking about?"_

_"Well," says Jack, deeply uncomfortable, "I know you...cared about him. And I'm sorry that he did this to you."_

_Will props his eyelids up as much as he can and stares at Jack warily._

_"You were the best chance we had, and I'm not proud of it, but I'm not gonna apologize for taking our last opportunity to bring him in. Just...I'm sorry that..." He sighs and tents his fingers across his mouth as if to temper the words. "I'm sorry we had to take advantage of your feelings for each other to do it."_

"Feelings?" _Will goes into another wracking coughing fit. Jack reaches for the buzzer again and Will tries to waves his arm,_ no no no. _"Jack, I...didn't..."_

 _"I'm trying to be sensitive about this!" Jack barks, agitated by how awkward he feels. He's ashamed to be raising his voice. "I know you loved him, and with Bella...going, this..._ kind of thing _has been on my mind, okay? In this line of work...when you go undercover...I don't know, sometimes things are complicated!" He reaches the end of his rope and gets up to stalk around the room, clasping his hands behind his back._

_"In this line of work..." he repeats, softer this time, "in our line of work, if you try to act unaffected, eventually the chickens come home to roost and you end up tied to a desk or out of a job."_

_Will rolls his eyes up to the drop-tiled ceiling, maybe praying for assistance himself._

_"Jack..." he says weakly, "it wasn't...like that."_

_Jack makes one more circuit of the room and sits back down, smoothing his tie. He looks at Will._

_"Will. We all knew."_

_Jack can see Will's horror._

_"That's what made this...so difficult. Like I said, these things happen. You work with someone, you see them every day, you're in tight situations, dangerous situations, and sometimes...these things_ happen!" _he says again, rapidly exhausting his store of euphemisms. "He was your therapist, for Christ's sake! And you weren't in your right mind! Then having to play the part and pretend to be someone he could trust—"_

_Will grimaced. Jack hadn't meant to put it that way._

_"It just..._ happens. _So please...accept the apology."_

_"I accept it," Will says tiredly. "It's accepted."_

_"Okay." Jack is able to sit back. "If you wanna talk...I'm here, and I can come by whenever I'm not with Bella. I have the time now."_

_"Thanks." A pause. "Really, thank you," he says again. "It's been...hard." He smiles at the enormity of the understatement; so does Jack. "But...I'm...it wasn't...real."_

_Jack looks at him seriously, feeling a strange mix of emotions, not sure how to communicate what he wants to say. "Will...if you feel it, it's real," he says slowly. "It might not be right, or good, or fair, but..."_

_He exhales and looks away. "We all liked him, Will. I didn't want to believe it. I let myself be blind to it for longer than I should have, and that's on me. And believe me, I feel it. It's damned heavy. But...I hate to say it now, but we all wanted you to find some peace, Will. And if you got any peace out of your...time with him, don't throw it out now. You're going to need it."_

_Jack sees a tear sneak down Will's face. He seems unaware, then with an expression of discomfort he sniffs violently. He tries to bring a hand to his face but his arm rises only an inch before it drops back and he grits his teeth. "Goddammit," he says thickly, hopelessly frustrated. "Fuck."_

_Jack stands up, not meeting his eyes. "I'll see you soon, Will."_

_"Jack, wait. Abigail came by earlier. We need to talk about what's going to happen when they discharge her."_

_Jack looks at him with what he's sure must be an odd expression. He can't bring himself to do it._

_"Get some rest, Will," he mutters instead. He picks up his hat and shuffles into the hallway, closing the door behind him. In the hallway he stands with his eyes closed just outside the door and breathes for several minutes. Behind his lids his eyes sting._

 

They drive a long way on that first night before they stop.

The night clerk is slouched across the check-in counter, reading an abandoned large-print John Grisham paperback at arm's length, when the car pulls into the empty lot. The motel has been completely vacant for three days and he had been enjoying getting paid to do nothing. Oh well.

He sits up straighter and knocks his hat against the counter a few times before reseating it on his bald head, then leans over to see what there is to see through the glass door. He guesses it will be a sloppy drunk trailing some hired pussy.

Instead two men get out. He squints.

About the same height. One darker, one fair. Each carries a bag. He watches as the fair one touches the darker's back and leans very close to whisper something to him, and although he can't hear the words, he can see it just fine when the darker-haired man smiles and kisses the other.

_Fucking disgusting._

"How much for the night?" the one with dark hair asks when they reach the counter.

The clerk's eyes flick to the other man's face. It strikes him as almost unnaturally expressionless.

"Motel is shutting down end of this month," he grunts. "We only got two rooms set up still, both singles. You want two beds you gotta buy both. Sixty each."

"One," the dark-haired man says, digging a damp-looking wad of cash out of his back pocket and peeling off three twenties.

The clerk's face settles into a look of distaste. He feels the other man's eyes on him and looks up.

"Problem?"

"Not at all," the man says. He has some sort of accent. "You seem a bit unhappy."

The clerk mutters something under his breath.

"Pardon?"

"You heard me, queer!" the clerk hisses, going red in the face. "I called you a fucking _fag!_ Now I got _no_ plans to sit here listening to you two hump all night, so how's about you and your little boyfriend move along!"

"Hannibal," the dark-haired man says.

"I think we'll stay," Hannibal says pleasantly. His smile makes the clerk very uncomfortable for no reason he can place and it's pissing him off even more. "By the way, if we should have need of you later, are you on duty until morning? When does your relief come in?"

"You don't worry about that and just get the fuck out, faggot," the clerk says hotly.

The foreign-sounding man makes no move to comply. His eyes touch on something behind him on the wall. Work schedule.

"Not until noon? My," he says to his companion. The other man sighs and makes a _I wash my hands of it_ gesture.

"What the hell does that mean?" the clerk demands, face twisted in disgust.

Hannibal turns his cool vulpine eyes to him and he feels cold all over.

 

The room does not have a stove, just a microwave, so Hannibal Lecter commandeers the kitchenette in the room off the lobby. The cabinets prove to be nearly bare. Hannibal makes steaks, which require no other ingredients. They eat at a picnic table set up out front under a floodlight swarming with moths.

Will Graham picks at his dinner.

"Kindly don't play with it, Will," Hannibal says, teasing and entirely serious.

Will puts his fork down.

"Don't scold me like that. I'm not a child."

Hannibal looks up at him, chewing.

"You're worked up," he says. "What about?"

"I don't know," Will grumbles.

"Because we're only a state away from Molly?"

It was Will's idea to start in Florida. They visited Molly first, without her knowledge, of course. Will just wanted to see them, her and Walter.

When they arrived, a red pickup was cooling in the driveway. Walter, Molly, and a man in a baseball cap got out with groceries and went inside.

Will went straight back to the car and Hannibal followed him. Immediately he had insisted on driving into Marathon and making their first kill, a big one, five people.

"She'll know," he says now, gloomily. "She'll read about it and she'll _know_ it was me."

"Us," Hannibal corrects delicately, with a small inclination of his fork. Will bites at the inside of his cheek.

"She'll know I'm alive," he says, stubborn.

"And she will be hurt that you didn't stop by?"

"No. She'll...tell...I don't know." Molly had no information whatsoever.

"Darling, try to relax," Hannibal says reassuringly, patting Will's hand. "We're on vacation."

 

Jack waits all day for Alana's call. Instead she appears unannounced on his doorstep that afternoon, wife and son in tow.

"Jack," she says, smiling, when he opens the door.

"Dr. Bloom!" he says. "Margot, hello."

"And hello to you," he says to Morgan in a cooing tone that Alana could have never pictured coming out of Jack Crawford. Morgan Verger, four years old, stares back at Jack with huge eyes, thumb in his mouth, slobber soaking the arm of his tiny sweater. "Come in."

Alana leaves Margot and Morgan in the living room and joins Jack in the kitchen as he makes the coffee.

"Jack, we have to talk about this."

"Do we?"

"Yes," Alana whisper-hisses. "Don't you think so? What are we going to do?"

"I," Jack says, "am not planning on doing anything."

He presses the button on the coffee maker and leans against the counter, crossing his arms. Alana is in disbelief.

"Are you serious?"

"Very," Jack says.

"Do you think it isn't them?"

"It's them."

"Doesn't that scare you?"

Jack looks at her sadly. "No."

Alana does not understand. She says nothing, trying to figure it out.

"Do you...want them to...?"

"No. I just know they won't be dropping by. Alana, all they ever wanted was each other, and out. It's still fucked up, but I see it now." He raises his eyebrows. "I don't think they need any other revenge. They're living well."

Alana still doesn't get it, and it's making her feel frustratingly stupid in a terribly familiar way. "So you're fine with this."

"No. I will never be 'fine' with murder. Of anyone, by anyone." The coffee maker beeps and Jack reaches down three mugs.

"What I am is at peace with the fact that those boys are no longer my problem. Goddamn _thankful,_ as it happens. If Hannibal was on his own, I might be watching my back a little more carefully. But I _know,"_ Jack stresses, making it clear that he has no interest in debate, _"know_ Will is not going to be party to my death. And I think that means I'm in the clear."

Alana is skeptical. She debates anyway, as Jack knew she would.

"You really think you can assume Will is still Will? Jack...Miriam Lass. He wiped her clean and rewrote the whole book. He programmed her like _The Manchurian Candidate."_

"I know what happened to Miriam Lass," Jack growls.

He turns his back to her and starts pouring coffee, trying to stay patient. Alana...just never saw it. Jack isn't sure why he did, but he does. He wonders if he should be worried about _that._

"I can't believe you could so easily forget what Hannibal is capable of," Alana says, shaking her head. She twists her wedding band.

"Alana, you knew Will Graham and you knew Hannibal Lecter. You don't know Will and Hannibal. I guarantee you, if they're really out there somewhere together, they are an entirely different creature together than either of the men you knew."

Alana sips her coffee and doesn't argue further.

 

The shower in the motel room is a very tiny, narrow tub (complete with horrifying ring) behind a mildewed liner. When Will turns the water on, the showerhead spits and gurgles before producing a stream, and even then it occasionally stutters. At least it's hot. Will inhales and exhales a few deep lungfuls of steam before he begins washing his hair.

"Room for one more?" Hannibal inquires, and begins jamming himself in behind Will without waiting for an answer.

"No! There's hardly room for me as it is!" Will says, laughing, as Hannibal wraps his arms around his waist from behind and kisses the back of his neck.

"I'll stay out of your way. Go about your business."

Defiantly Will does so, exaggerating his movements to splash Hannibal as he rinses out the shampoo. Hannibal takes one hand off Will's waist to help.

"Are you going to wash behind your ears, Will? From back here I can see you've been slacking."

"Stop," Will groans. "Can't a man take a shower in peace?"

"No," Hannibal says, and wraps a soapy hand around Will's cock, starting to kiss and suck at his neck.

His wet grip is the perfect combination of firm and slick. In light of this sudden turn of events, Will is starting to feel better about things. _Better_ and better. The hot steam seems to melt him into Hannibal, their bodies the same temperature as the air. Hannibal is making him feel amazing.

Will lets his head lower back to his lover's shoulder, breathing heavy.

"There we are," Hannibal whispers to him, pleased.

Hannibal is hard against him now. Will leans over and holds to the rim of the tub, parting his legs as far as he can in the cramped basin. He prays that when he slips the faucet will only break all his teeth, not poke his eye out with the top of the little rod that plugs and unplugs the drain.

From behind Hannibal spreads him and slips one of his duplicated middle fingers inside to twist in and out. Will sucks in steam with his sharp inhale, already very uncomfortable in this position but unwilling to move. When Hannibal touches him he goes on autopilot, moving only in reaction to Hannibal's movements. Something about Hannibal's touch drops him into a strange place in his head.

Two fingers, three...Will writhes against their motion, feeling so full and good and stretched. He moans helplessly, blood rushing to his head from the acute angle at which Hannibal is bending him now, making him dizzy in tandem with the steam.

Hannibal must be enjoying himself up there, because he takes his sweet time with this, pressing in and pulling out in long slow strokes like a gradient of sensation from his fingertips together to the base of all three. The muscles in Will's legs tremble and he breathes in short hard gasps. This might end before Hannibal even starts fucking him.

"Oh, _please..._ Hannibal, I need it..."

"What do you need?" he asks softly. "I can give you my cock, but I can't let you cum."

Will doesn't want to cum now, not yet, before Hannibal gets inside him, but being told he _can't_ raises an interesting feeling in him like mental goosebumps.

"Well?"

"Your cock. I need your cock."

Hannibal nearly drags him back to the main room and gets him facedown on the bloody sheets, shoving into Will hard right away after preparing him for so long. The jolts up Will's spine are both the impacts of Hannibal's body and bright streaks of pleasure. They're not under the hot water anymore but he still feels like he's melting, fading away into it, dissolving into the sheets until he half-shouts and cums all over the hand Hannibal's working over his cock.

Hannibal slows and pulls out. Will is trying to remember how to breathe. He forgets pretty often these days. Hannibal lays down on his side next to him and kisses his face, whispering, "Sweet thing."

Will takes one last deep breath and lets it out slowly. "Lay back."

He does. Will moves and takes Hannibal into his mouth, sucking and jerking.

 _"Yes..._ just like that, Will," Hannibal murmurs, breathless. _"Yes,_ that's _perfect..."_

Hannibal takes hold of his hair, tightens his fingers in it, Will can feel the tension in his arms, shoulders, neck. He can feel Hannibal straining not to reflexively yank his head down on his cock, force it down his throat. Will can't do it yet—Hannibal does it exquisitely.

Hannibal's hips angle upward and he's caught like that for a moment and then he moans _"yes"_ one more time and shudders against him, Will finds holds on his hip bones and digs his nails in, sucking Hannibal through his orgasm. He doesn't swallow until Hannibal opens his eyes. Will likes him to know.

They are laying there cuddling only in the most inactive of ways when Will remembers he was upset about something. By this point Will is feeling positively enlightened. He forgot entirely about Molly and the boring old guilt-and-shame routine, the bizarre anger he felt when he saw the man in the baseball cap. Once in a while he can be in the moment, and it's usually when Hannibal is in _him,_ making him moan and beg and writhe and cum.

"What a day, huh?" Will whispers eventually, trailing a lazy hand down Hannibal's ribs.

"One for the books," Hannibal says, drowsy. His eyes are already closing.

The bed is wet from them, but neither of them care. The moisture feathers the edges of fresh blots of the clerk's blood soaked into the sheets. They drape their arms over each other loosely, settling in towards sleep.

The room is hot with steam and sex and there's no air conditioning unit, so they don't bother untucking the sad thin comforter. A sweet summer night smell comes in the slightly open window, from behind the curtains.

 

The next morning, bright and early, Freddie Lounds sits cross-legged on her bed, staring at the headline she's composing for her new blog entry. _No._ She pokes at her backspace button and begins typing again: _"WE HAVE TO STOP MEETING LIKE THIS": MURDER HUSBANDS' BLOODY MOTEL RENDEZVOUS._ She sits back and nods, smiling.

> _JUST LIKE OLD TIMES: Over the weekend the Southern United States boiled like a stirred anthill with the news of the first confirmed sighting of Murder Husbands Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, previously presumed dead._
> 
> _The lovers' gruesome exploits, which seemingly ended 13 months ago in a dramatic murder-suicide (which was which?), were previously_ _covered here extensively by this reporter_ (this phrase is a link that leads to posts on _Tattle Crime_ tagged #murderhusbands).
> 
> _In the last 48 hours six people have died in ways eerily reminiscent of the Chesapeake Ripper's crimes, committed over decades throughout the Delmarva area by Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, but many refused to believe he and his murderous lover could have survived their fateful swan dive._
> 
> _Now there's proof! A faithful reader thought quickly enough to capture an image of the two together Saturday night, in the flesh, and even managed to escape with his life!_
> 
> _Reader, I must warn you that the following photograph is very disturbing. Please use caution when viewing._

Freddie takes a sip of her Starbucks and starts laughing hysterically. "Sorry, Will," she chokes, wiping a tear from her eye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello and welcome to Badlands...I was about to say I THINK this is gonna be a long one, but it's already 13,859 words long and 28 pages of single-spaced 12pt Times New Roman (gets me in essay mode lol) so I guess it's already long as fuck. I really wanted to finish and edit it all first but I can't hold out, so I'm gonna start posting bits as I firm them up. I think it's going to be a very slow process tho lol.
> 
> I really hope you like this one because I'm seriously loving writing this. It's just flowing (most of it) and it's such a fun and challenging thing to be writing something this long, I think it's probably the longest piece i've ever written.
> 
> "Badlands" is a working title btw. It's cuz of the movie, you know. Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate etc.
> 
> Please please please comment and pretty please check out my Tumblr!!! stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com


	2. 2 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Whoever he was, this individual's interest must have been piqued by the flutter of the curtain behind their cracked window, the dim glow of the light from the bathroom behind it. He investigated. The interesting scene he discovered he preserved in a reasonably clear picture that he sold directly to Freddie Lounds between 3am and 8am this morning. Will is grateful that he was more interested in padding his wallet than calling the fucking FBI tipline.
> 
> The headline reads "WE HAVE TO STOP MEETING LIKE THIS": MURDER HUSBANDS' BLOODY MOTEL RENDEZVOUS.
> 
> TW: brief mention of sexual assault

> _It looks good_  
>  _It tastes like nothing on earth_  
>  _It looks good_  
>  _It tastes like nothing on earth_  
>  _It's so smooth_  
>  _It even feels like skin  
>  It tells me how it feels to be new _
> 
> _It tells me how it feels to be new_  
>  _A thousand voices whisper it true_  
>  _It tells me how it feels to be new  
>  And every voice belongs  
>  Every voice belongs to you _
> 
> _—The Cure, "Kyoto Song"_

 

They pack up nice and early in the chilly dawn, leave without a hitch, and are now making good time to nowhere in particular. They are heading west.

To pass the time Will is idly fucking around on Hannibal's iPad. On a whim he types in tattlecrime.com, interested in seeing what direction the investigation is taking in the Robinsons' deaths. He doubts they could have anything valuable at this point.

The investigators don't. But Freddie does.

Will closes his eyes and opens them again. Closes them. Opens them. The picture is real.

Given that the motel was very isolated and otherwise empty, Will and Hannibal's precautions after dispatching the clerk had been limited to locking all the doors and turning out the lights and neon sign. It did not appear that the motel was particularly popular in life, so their main goal was communicating _closed_ to random passers-by. It seemed unlikely that anyone would show up determined to look for trouble in a shuttered motel at three in the morning.

Improbably, however, someone did. Maybe he saw the motel from the road, apparently shut down, and wanted to see if there was anything worth looting. Maybe he was a transient looking for a bed. He could have been a friend of the clerk or even a cop checking in. They would never know: Freddie was not in the habit of tattling when it came to her own sources.

Whoever he was, this individual's interest must have been piqued by the flutter of the curtain behind their cracked window, the dim glow of the light from the bathroom behind it. He investigated. The interesting scene he discovered he preserved in a reasonably clear picture that he sold directly to Freddie Lounds between 3am and 8am this morning. Will is grateful that he was more interested in padding his wallet than calling the fucking FBI tipline.

The headline reads _"WE HAVE TO STOP MEETING LIKE THIS": MURDER HUSBANDS' BLOODY MOTEL RENDEZVOUS._

Below it is a picture taken with flash from outside their window last night, their photographer's hand blown out and blurry as he pulls the curtain aside. It shows Will and Hannibal curled up together in bed, naked and fast asleep. They are unmistakably post-coital. A heap of bloody clothing is piled in the foreground, and bloodstains on the sheets are clearly visible in the flash, presumably the "disturbing" element of the image mentioned by Ms. Lounds. Other things are also visible, or would be were it not for Ms. Lounds' famous big-black-box treatment.

 _So Freddie Lounds has seen not only_ my _penis, but my boyfriend's too. Great._

The part of his brain that spits out bad jokes in crisis situations gloats a little that at least Freddie is probably very jealous of him right now. Hannibal is very photogenic naked. She would have had ample time to appreciate some of the finer points of his physique while editing that nice big box in.

He is not looking forward to telling Hannibal.

"Hannibal," Will says reluctantly.

"Yes, my darling."

"You better pull over first."

Hannibal says nothing as he examines it. Will watches his eyes tracking back and forth as he reads the text of the post. His face does not change but the fury radiating from him begins to reach Will all the way in the passenger seat.

Finally he says, "That Ms. Lounds never has been in possession of much class." He sounds disappointed in her.

"No," Will answers warily.

"I would be sorry to kill her. She can be quite useful."

"I want to talk to her," Will says, seeing a chance to save Freddie's life. "I think she can be trusted to look after her own interests. Maybe we could make this work to our advantage."

"Maybe so."

 

Major newspapers refuse to run the "very disturbing" photo, but it spreads across the internet and certain sleazier pseudo-news programs like wildfire. _Somewhere, Freddie Lounds is pinching herself,_ Alana thinks, staring at the front page of _Tattle Crime_ with the most disapproving frown she can muster.

_So they're alive. They made it._

_And they're not even trying very hard to hide it. Do they want to get caught? They'd never see each other again. Or is love—ha, more like mutually-enabled narcissism—making them sloppy? I hope so._

She's still frustrated with Jack, who has steadfastly maintained his position of non-action. She doubts this will change his mind. Hopefully, given how thoroughly he avoids the internet, he'll never see it. Alana wishes she wasn't seeing it right now.

And of course, there's nothing she can do about it.

She pounds her fist a few times on her desk and sits back to think. Jack was her connection at the FBI. She can go to the police and tell them Hannibal made threats against her and her family while confined her hospital, and that she now fears he may try to carry them out. The cops will all but pat her on the head and go back to doing nothing until she has "proof" she and Morgan and Margot are in danger.

She could buy a gun and take Margot to the range and they can both refresh their skills, then spend tense months or possibly years never letting Morgan out of their sight, waiting to see if the "Murder Husbands" decide to pay them a visit.

She could move and change her name. All of their names.

She could try to find them herself and kill them.

She could hire someone to find them and kill them.

Where is her brother-in-law when she needs him? She likes Mason far better rotting in the ground, that's for sure, but he certainly would have known a guy.

Alana drums her fingers on the table. She wants them dead. She wants to see the bodies this time. The ease with which that truth occurs to her shocks her.

Will and Hannibal were her friends and she loved them. Maybe she felt a little something more for Hannibal once upon a time. But Will and Hannibal are dead.

To Alana these two men are only unholy reanimated corpses. The Hannibal Lecter she knew, and joked with, and kissed, died in his spacious and tasteful kitchen in Baltimore four years ago. Her Will Graham died the day she found out about Matthew Brown, even longer ago than that now.

Seeing them alive is like seeing a ghost, and maybe it does scare her after all. They belong at the bottom of the ocean, not walking around. Maybe that's why thinking of their bullet-riddled bodies, slumped forward across the dashboard at the end of some sordid televised car chase, makes her feel anchored again. Instead of like a monster.

She'll be waiting a long time to see that scene become reality. The federal investigation is floundering and the entire country is in the grip of a hysterical uproar. After beginning their spree in heavily populated Florida, Will and Hannibal are now quickly moving inland towards the sparser areas of the country where they will be guaranteed fewer witnesses and less immediate discovery of bodies. As of yet there is no way to predict where they'll strike next. No connection between the victims has been found.

So far, in fact, this photograph is the first and only lead in the case. On-location forensics are in progress, but unless they're bluffing, they have turned up exactly zip: Alana knows Hannibal, as is his custom, will be leaving the scenes sterile as a surgeon's theater. It shouldn't be _possible_ to disappear so entirely in the United States.

It's the Tooth Fairy all over again, on a county-wide scale.

Alana calls Jack.

"Crawford."

"Jack, it's me."

"Hello, Alana. How are you doing?" Jack sounds wary.

"I need a favor. I need you to find out who the head of the federal investigation is and get me in contact with them."

"Alana..."

"Jack, please. Think about Morgan. Think about Margot. I have to do something."

"Alana, I'm telling you right now that this is a bad idea. They are not coming for you. But if you do this, you might draw their attention. You may force the hand."

"For once please listen to me, Jack!" Alana hates it. She hates begging and the way it sounds coming out of her. "If you won't do it for me, at least think of the next victims! You can tell me they're not coming for me, but there are people they _are_ coming for who have no idea! Right now there are people, entire families, in this country living their lives on a countdown clock!"

"So you think you can anticipate their movements somehow? Help the investigation? _How?_ You don't care about those families, Alana. You care about yours. And you should. That's where your head should be. Let it go, Alana. You don't have to be part of the Hannibal Lecter story anymore, so why are you insisting on writing yourself in? You are _involving_ yourself."

"Hannibal involved me," she says. The old steel that ran in her when she dealt with Hannibal daily in her hospital is coming back. "I cannot be _un_ involved until Hannibal Lecter is dead."

Silence on the line. "Alana, why are you doing this?"

"He made me a promise."

 

_Dark in the high-ceilinged room when Alana comes to treat with Lecter. Make the deal she does not want to make. A true deal with the Devil. Sometimes when Margot is touching her, moving inside her, curling her sweet fingers into that spot that makes her cum she shrieks instead of moans and starts crying. Margot just holds her._

_Margot knows that sometimes she still feels the Devil inside her._

_The way Hannibal made her cum was so incredible, so deep, so terrifying in its intensity that she believed half-consciously in the years after that it must be the work of the Devil. The thought is buried deep—she would dismiss it as ridiculous if it ever floated to the surface. But there had been an obscene flavor to their lovemaking—it was_ too _good, too easy to lose herself in, too addictive, too much. He drove her wild in bed, but something in her sensed his passion was a frighteningly perfect pastiche, and behind it he was cold. In her ignorance she had attributed her unease in being with him to the metallic tang of betraying Will._

_It was true that she had felt intensely guilty, although she'd never made Will any promises. It was just the fact of Will's "friends" having a grand old time mashing their bodies together in Hannibal Lecter's beautiful, comfortable home while Will himself sat alone in a cell in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, maybe thinking of how Alana had invoked the stinging words "professional curiosity" after he kissed her. How she had explained to him that the way she was simply wasn't compatible with, as he finished bitterly, "the way I am." Between them the unspoken word that haunted him everywhere he went: "unstable."_

_But even disregarding Will, there was something about the way Hannibal manipulated her body with such ease and authority that unsettled her deep down, too deep to be truly aware of. His abilities were studied, unnatural. Uncanny. Not wholesome. Like he was as much a master of bodies as minds. Like he was not so much making love to her as coldly applying the appropriate pre-determined methods to leave her gasping and seeing stars, for some obscure reasons of his own that went beyond a man's desire to satisfy a partner._

_Hannibal Lecter was not a man._

_In later years she imagines that his mouth had tasted like blood. It hadn't. It had tasted like fine wine, or savory and sweet like salted caramel. She had found herself desperately attracted to him, going back every time she decided she wouldn't. She could find nothing wrong with him. He treated her better than any man she'd ever been with, by miles. But when she kissed him goodbye and sat down in her car in the mornings she felt weak, drained, less than she had been the night before. Once or twice there was a stupor, like the aftertaste of an opiate high._

_At home getting ready for work after nights she had spent with him, she felt compelled to check herself for marks in the shower, telling herself she was looking for unprofessional hickeys. But in the back of her mind was Mia Farrow in_ Rosemary's Baby _, waking up to find the Devil's claw marks scored into the flesh of her back._

_She thinks sometimes about the body's furnace, the way you are, in a very literal sense, what you eat. That her muscles and organs are built of Cobb salads and beer and McDonald's and the protein shakes she drinks for breakfast. That Hannibal's body repairs and rebuilds his cells with what he eats as well—the flesh of his victims. His body, the body she touched and kissed and took inside her, is a graveyard._

_In the dark divided by the unbreakable glass that keeps Hannibal away from her, she gives him the terms of the deal. Help us get the Dragon, you get your creature comforts back. No more, no less. She is afraid he won't take it. Why should he?_

_He looms out of the dark, suddenly close to the barrier, close enough to smell her._

_"You died in my kitchen, Alana," he says, so softly, "when you chose to be brave. Every moment since is borrowed."_

_"Your wife. Your child. They belong to me."_

_She remembers what he said to her the day he was declared insane._

_"I always keep my promises."_

 

The next place they stop turns out to be a farm in the literal middle of nowhere. They've been driving in shifts for hours, and before they come upon the farmhouse the only scenery all day has been endless fields of Kansas wheat. Will wonders if Hannibal specifically chose this house, but there's no way he could have. How would he know it was here?

The crude roadside signs shouting about hell and damnation make Will vaguely uncomfortable. They remind him too much of _Children of the Corn._ He knows, however, that he and Hannibal are the deadliest things for miles, maybe in the whole state. Or the country, or the world. Somehow this makes him feel safe. If you're on Hannibal Lecter's side, nothing in the universe can touch you.

Except him.

The older couple who occupy the farmhouse have no children. Will is glad. They grant them kind deaths, before they even know what's happening. No games.

But Will still feels it, he feels what killing means to him now in some place in his body like being born with a defect in your heart, a part of you that wants to end other lives, feel the forbidden rush. It still scares him how much he needs it, how he's practically addicted. He and Hannibal are junkies, plain and simple: their relationship is exactly as dirty and desperate, always thinking about the next hit before you're done depressing the plunger.

Murder is the invisible third angle in their triangle, their shared lover, they wake up mornings with murder lying between them in bed and make love to it together, their bodies only proxies for it, like a necrophiliac's lover cold from the ice bath she takes to get him off.

It may not be their whole story, but it's close enough for jazz. Will stares at the house as he eats. If murder is their lover, Hannibal's cooking is the fruit of knowledge: it tastes damn good and you can never go back.

He wonders why he thinks so Biblically lately. Maybe killing did that to you. Certainly Hannibal was always going on about God.

_If one does what God does enough times, one will become as God is._

The thought seemed to come from outside his head, unbidden. He briefly fears the reappearance of his psychotic symptoms. They have died down in recent months, but like every mentally ill person, he awaits their return vigilantly.

On the grass near the barn they have spread a handmade quilt borrowed from the house, and Will lays back on it now, palms sandwiched behind his head. He's uncomfortably aware that it was probably pieced by the woman he's currently digesting. Above him, the sky is infinite. The deep azure blue of it aches in his chest. It looks hyperreal, too blue, too clear.

Since he died, everything looks and feels and smells and tastes different. The painful sharpness of it is distinct from the effects of his disordered sensory processing, his PTSD-related dissociative episodes. Vaguely he associates the change with Hannibal. Something tells him this is the state Hannibal's existed in every day of his life. If he continues to do what Hannibal does, will he become as Hannibal is? Or does murder itself, like trauma, physically alter the brain?

As Will wanders in his thoughts, Hannibal glances over and is struck by his beauty. Every day it happens at least once, and every time there's something new to paralyze him. Right now it's the way the sky's reflection is deepening and intensifying the blue-gray of Will's eyes.

Hannibal stops eating. He lays himself down beside Will on the quilt and looks where he's looking. Will smiles at the wisps of cloud overhead.

"You're beautiful, Will," Hannibal says quietly. "Were you aware of that?"

"This is the first I'm hearing of it."

"I love you."

Will rolls to his side and kisses him and says, "I love you, Hannibal."

They kiss and kiss as Hannibal holds Will against him. They do this, just lie beside each other, touching each other, appreciating the solid reality of each other's bodies. Sometimes it blurs into fucking; sometimes this is all they need.

Today they have killed, and Hannibal wants him. Death reminds him of how close they came to never having this, to never being able to really explore each other. Never getting to fall asleep and wake up and make love together. To Hannibal their union is a holy act of God. Equal but opposite forces which achieve perfection only in combination. When they have sex after killing it's something like completion.

He draws back to look at his other half and this time it's the crooked, almost shy smile on Will's face that pierces. Loving Will has been an endless procession of novelties for him: the way it feels, that it _has_ a feeling, chief among them. Will is real to him in a world of inconsequential ghosts, maybe the only other real person there is.

_And now, for better or worse, they all know he's mine._

How does the public see Hannibal now that Will is with him always? Can they see that "the Cannibal" is in love? Or do they think Will Graham is held against his will, brainwashed like poor little Bedelia Du Maurier?

Clothes are coming off and Hannibal kisses Will's neck, kisses his collar bones, kisses down his chest. He takes Will into his mouth and Will sighs his approval.

Hannibal never can get enough of the way Will tastes. He's glad he never succeeded in literally eating him. This way he won't ever have to stop tasting him.

For Hannibal Lecter, that is something like love.

He suspects the masses probably believe he isn't capable of such a thing: love. _I am a monster, after all._ Could they ever conceive of him—Hannibal Lecter, damned murderer of far more than he can readily remember anymore—feeling the way he feels when Will Graham holds him close and smiles at him, when Will falls asleep in his arms, when Will moans his name?

Probably not. Hannibal himself hasn't quite been able to wrap his head around it yet.

It is a myth that those without empathy do not feel emotion. But emotions for and about a person other than _himself_ —that is proving difficult for him to get used to. It's a little like looking unexpectedly into a trick mirror, like doublethink, like missing a step on the way down the stairs. He doesn't know if he would describe it as enjoyable, at least for all the fuss. It is, however, surreal and exhilarating.

Still he wonders. Thanks to Ms. Lounds, everyone has seen that they sleep together. Do they suppose he takes Will by force? The idea that the public may think of Will as one more pitiable victim, Hannibal as his rapist rather than his lover, offends his pride.

Will is sounding very close to bliss when Hannibal stops to muse aloud, "Perhaps I've found a job for Ms. Lounds."

"Hannibal," Will says, panting a little, "can we not talk about Freddie Lounds while we have sex?"

"Why not? She's an attractive young woman."

"I want your full attention, that's why."

"Nothing ever gets my full attention," Hannibal says solemnly. Will rolls his eyes.

"Yes, you are a prodigy. Tell me what you're thinking about Freddie so I can get off."

"You're very impatient. What is it you're in such a hurry for? Are you expecting something?"

Will sighs in frustration as Hannibal nonchalantly goes back to sucking marks into his chest. He lets him go on for a moment then shoves him away.

Hannibal grins. Teasing Will is one of his favorite things; it's so easy to poke him into an exasperated, if affectionate, fit. Strange that the abilities that allow him to control others so completely are mainly used now to make Will laugh.

"Just tell me!" Will demands.

"I may recruit _Tattle Crime_ as our personal PR firm," Hannibal says. He leans on one elbow. "If Freddie Lounds wants exclusive content, we can give it to her."

"Why? What makes you think she won't just call the hotline?"

"Freddie and I have similar motives in life. I don't believe she will feel any obligation to inform on us. What she wants is what benefits _Tattle Crime_ —information. She may trade for it. In return she can actively mislead the investigation and tell the story that we wish to present."

"Which is what?" Will asks, his mouth twitching. "'What I Did on My Summer Vacation'?"

"Whatever we like," says Hannibal patiently.

"You're vain, that's all. You liked being a well-respected member of society _and_ a murderer, and now you want your audience back."

The look Hannibal gives him says this is one of the times Will could be seeing him a little less.

"Okay, fine," Will says. "Maybe it'll be useful in a pinch."

"Good," says Hannibal. He climbs over Will's legs and gets on his knees to either side of them, then roughly yanks Will's ass into position by the hips with a dry "excuse me" that cracks Will up. He lowers his mouth to Will.

"Ahhh..." Will exhales at the first touch of his tongue, twisting his shoulders against the ground. For a moment his muscles go a little limp against Hannibal's grip as Hannibal licks, sucks, pushes his tongue in and out of him. Fingers next, then Hannibal's cock, slowly, slowly. Will closes his eyes, pressing his cheek against the quilt.

Every time they fuck, Will's reaction upon first being penetrated is so intensely arousing that Hannibal must look away to stay in control. It's something about the short flash of pain on his features, the lip bite, the flush (Will flushes easily, and it works on something in Hannibal), the way his brows draw together, the way his lips drift gradually apart, his wet tongue, the sounds. The way Will grips handfuls of the sheets or the grass or the sand or the cushions, or draws his nails down the wood or the tile or the wall of the shower, or Hannibal's back... The way Hannibal knows taking his cock hurts him, but he has to have it. The way Will is overcome.

But before long Hannibal looks back—he can't bear not to, he needs to see him, put vision to sound, watch the muscles of Will's back move sinuously as he twists and tenses below him. It's just after midday and still hot in this unshadowed patch, and Will is wet with sweat now, panting, making small noises of pleasure, rocking back to meet his cock. He's tight, so goddamn tight around Hannibal's cock, the feel of him taking Hannibal in on each thrust forward is forcing Hannibal to consciously control his breathing, slow his heart.

He thinks that he touches a little of what Francis Dolarhyde, God rest his pathetic soul, was feeling when he marveled to Hannibal over the telephone that a living woman had touched him. His first living woman.

Fucking Will is like no other sex Hannibal has ever had, and he had a good sample size for comparison. In his life he had gone through periods of boredom with sex. It was so easy for him that it had very little mental thrill. Manipulation was his forte and most people were so desperate for sex that it did not take long for him to find the thing that would make them want him. Will, actually, had been particularly difficult there.

Before he truly understood that he was in love with Will he sometimes spent a few days applying what he observed of Will to idly trying to fuck him, but Will was either very strong-willed (given that he now knew Will had wanted him for a long time) or extremely oblivious. He suspects it might be the latter. He always has more difficulty steering people on the autism spectrum. But then again...maybe it was just Will's unpredictability, the unpredictability that he so loved.

The unpredictability and the intelligence and the perceptiveness and the face that reminded him of fat rosy cherubs despite not resembling them at all, the gorgeous body that was writhing with pleasure under him, _holy God I'm going to cum if I keep looking at him._ He closes his eyes.

In the dark redness behind his lids he hears _"Oh, Hannibal..._ Hannibal... _fuck..._ you're so fucking good..."

"You feel incredible," he murmurs, half to himself, too quietly for Will to actually hear over his staccato breathing. "Christ..."

"Harder...please I need it _harder,_ make me cum Hannibal _please—"_

Harder, letting go of his control, letting his heart start to race. He wants to let go for this. Come down into the mortal world and be as one of them. Feel this. His body is urging him almost involuntarily faster and faster, and harder, and deeper, he loves to get as deep into Will as he can, loves the way Will's limbs go weak when he's completely inside.

Shuddering, Will breathes _"Hannibal..."_ as if he's in a dream and gasping, Hannibal cums inside him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you don't think "Kyoto Song" is the most Hannibal song of all time, get the fuck out of my face tbh.
> 
> Might be working up a little playlist for this thing. It's already made but only has like four song right now. Anyway, this is chapter two, "2 Badlands." I hope you enjoy and as always I REALLY hope you comment! I live for comments and I always respond! Pretty please drop me a line on Tumblr at stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com if you have one!


	3. 3 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Hello, is this the Tattle Crime tipline?"
> 
> "This is Freddie Lounds, so yes. Who am I speaking to?"
> 
> "Freddie, I'm hurt."
> 
> "Will?" Freddie looks around her empty apartment as if to see if anyone is listening; her cat blinks at her. "Is this...Will Graham?"
> 
> "That's me," sheepish.
> 
> Once in a great while, Freddie Lounds can actually be rendered speechless.

> _Visconte is me_  
>  _Magnani, you'll never be_  
>  _I entered nothing_  
>  _And nothing entered me_  
>  _Til you came_  
>  _With the key and  
>  You did your best but_
> 
> _As I live and breathe_  
>  _You have killed me_  
>  _You have killed me_  
>  _Yes, I walk around_  
>  _Somehow_  
>  _But you have killed me, you have killed me_
> 
> _Who am I that I  
>  Come to be here? _
> 
> _As I live and breathe_  
>  _You have killed me_  
>  _You have killed me_  
>  _Yes, I walk around_  
>  _Somehow_  
>  _But you have killed me_  
>  _You have killed me_
> 
>   
>  _And there is no point saying this again_  
>  _There is no point saying this again_  
>  _But I forgive you  
>  I forgive you  
>  Always I do forgive you_
> 
> _—Morrissey, "You Have Killed Me"_

 

The head of the federal investigation is not amenable to Alana's offer to help. He seems to think Alana "mishandled" things during her custody of the Ripper, sounds suspicious of her motives for helping.

She does not tell him that Hannibal threatened her family. She just offers her assistance as a psychiatric consultant who also happens to have known the Murder Husbands as Secret Star-Crossed Murder Lovers. He finds this suspicious too.

"Dr. Bloom," he says, and in hearing his tone Alana knows right away what he's about to bring up, "certain...details of your relationship to... _both_ Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham have come to light in the year since their disappearance. Dr. Chilton's book was quite illuminating in that regard."

 _Goddamn that Chilton._ Worst of all, Alana can't bring herself to even wish ill on him anymore, with all he's gone through. But he _is_ an idiot.

"Sir, I have a—wife," she and Margot had recently had a talk about trying to use the word more instead of weaseling into _partner,_ "and son. Are you trying to imply that I would help the Murder Husbands in any way because of a short personal relationship that ended four years ago, before I knew what he was?"

"Of course not," the head investigator replies flatly, lying. "But it's my responsibility to consider how you would relate to the subjects of the manhunt _I'm_ running _before_ I bring you into anything serious."

"Anything confidential."

"Yes, ma'am."

She knows the way it looks to people. Like anyone who could have had a "personal relationship" with Dr. Hannibal Lecter must be off somehow, even before the big reveal.

_Excuse me for being attracted to a sophisticated, handsome, intelligent doctor._

Probably they think she is the type of woman they imagine to be attracted by psychopaths, weak specimens with a need to be dominated. Maybe they even think she knew, knew and kept her mouth shut because she liked getting off with a murderer. Who knows what went on when she was the warden of the very facility where he was held? The press had published images of Hannibal's cell: rumors flew about the size and comfort.

Alana, of course, was not happy to give him so much room to roam, such a very non-jail-like cell, but extra space was needed for the laborious, risky process of transferring him on and off his handcart. Even more for additional guards in case something went wrong. She couldn't house him in earshot of other inmates either, not without putting their lives in danger. In fact, the special requirements of his custody were an enormous pain in her ass for three years, and she never feels the need to explain the specifics in interviews. She will not justify herself to idiots.

"I don't need to be part of the actual investigation. I wasn't planning to leave Baltimore," she says. "But I want to help. Just let me consult by phone and email if you get stuck."

"La—Doctor, we been stuck. If you think you can help, I won't delete the emails without reading them. But we may not give you much of what we have to work off."

"Fine." She curses silently. "And I'd rather keep a low profile with this. Please try to keep my name out of it in meetings and such."

"No problem," he grumbles. They exchange contact information.

 

"Hello, is this the _Tattle Crime_ tipline?"

"This is Freddie Lounds, so yes. Who am I speaking to?"

"Freddie, I'm hurt."

"Will?" Freddie looks around her empty apartment as if to see if anyone is listening; her cat blinks at her. "Is this...Will Graham?"

"That's me," sheepish.

Once in a great while, Freddie Lounds can actually be rendered speechless.

"Freddie?"

"Yes?" she manages. "Wait, why are you calling? Why are you calling me?"

"Pour yourself a stiff drink, Freddie. You just won the lottery."

"Oh my God. Oh my God."

"Oh, no," Will says, realizing his mistake, or hers. "Not like that." It feels cruel to laugh at Freddie's terror but he can't help it. "I mean I have something for you. I have the mother of all tips. If you want to take it."

"If I...what are you offering me, exactly?"

"Pictures," says Will, "suitable for Instagramming, short messages to the public, maybe video. Maybe even an interview. If you play along well enough, we could send you some goddamn Snapchats."

Freddie feels faint. She clutches at the cat for support and it mews in protest.

"For God's sake, _why?"_

"Hannibal seems to think we have an image problem," Will says. To Freddie he sounds exactly like a person who is currently rolling their eyes at their boyfriend. "We'd like more control over our media coverage. You sprang to mind."

"You came...to the right place, Will," Freddie says. The situation is beginning to sink in and she's switching into professional mode. "But I can't know where you are. I need deniability. I want to repeat that. Need-to-know only."

"Fine. We'll figure out some kind of way to remove location info from the photos, find an anonymous transmission method, avoid views of the landscape."

"That could actually work. It really could."

"Freddie Lounds, you're going to be rich."

Freddie puts her hand over her heart. There are actual tears in her eyes.

"God bless you, you depraved psychos," she sniffles.

 

Will takes the first few pictures sitting in the passenger seat of the car, bare feet up on the dashboard (Hannibal hates it), sipping Woodford Reserve from a glass pint bottle. About ten more are on the floor below the glove compartment. They had stopped at a combination liquor-and-convenience store and liberated a lot of booze along with their groceries and...some of the lone employee's organs.

Mostly they are running at night, hitting places where people will be asleep or alone, then watching the sunrise from behind the windshield or motel window and moving on when they wake up in the late afternoon. Will thinks they're probably into Colorado now. The wide open spaces are pleasant. The landscape is honest, upfront. He's thinking of asking Hannibal if they can stay in this area for a while. The deserts and plains feel right for what they're doing.

Hannibal keeps his eyes on the road, but he smiles as Will takes the pictures.

"I maintain veto power at all times."

"Same to you."

Will flicks through what he has so far. They look pretty good to him, although he suspects he has a lover's bias. Hannibal's hair is growing out and he ties it fastidiously in a small knot at the back of his head. Shorter pieces in the front lay on his forehead, above his eyes, where the sun is catching in red glints.

 _He's gorgeous. Goddamn him. He's gonna show me up when these hit_ Tattle Crime.

Will visually traces the line of his profile, his elegant nose, his lips, his jaw. He actually has a tiny growth of charmingly grayish stubble now. The smile reveals a little of his pointed teeth.

"Perfection, as always," Will pronounces.

"I do what I can," Hannibal replies modestly.

"Just drive."

"I don't seem to have much choice in the matter. Getting stopped for a DUI is not the ending I picture for this trip."

"What do you picture? Is there a plan?"

"Don't worry yourself about that, Will. I will take care of you."

"You know I love your surprises." He doesn't.

They hadn't gotten bored, exactly. But they were both aware that the other craved it too. Living alone in the little seaside house, getting up to very little trouble as far as murder went, their sexual activities had become bloodier as the year wore on, more violent, their exchanges more pointed and raw. They played rougher with each other. Will felt a restlessness. They'd become, and it was time to unleash it. Together, for the first time.

"Pull over and take a picture with me. There's no identifiable landmarks out here."

The side of the road transitions smoothly into empty red desert. Will props the iPad up on the hood of the car and adjusts it until there are no visible rock formations in the background, just flat horizon and pink sky.

At the last timer beep he pulls Hannibal's chin towards him and kisses him as the camera shutter noise goes off.

 

Margot knows immediately Alana is in an awful mood when she comes in the door. She kicks her very expensive shoes in the direction of the shoe rack and heads straight through to the back porch. Margot follows her, but she makes them drinks first.

"Where's Morgan?" Alana asks her as soon as she steps outside. She is smoking a cigarette.

Margot grins. "Where did you get that?"

"Where's our _son?"_ Alana asks again, and there's a hysterical note buried very deep in it, though not too deep for Margot.

"I asked your mother to watch him tonight," she replies gently. "I could tell you needed a night off."

Alana's face goes from irritation to relief to the verge of tears in the span of about thirty seconds. She puts her head in her hands and starts to cry. Margot sits in a chair beside her and rubs her back. She waves the gin and tonic under the curtain of her hair so Alana can see it and Alana chuckles weakly.

She takes the drink, still bent over with her arm strapped across her stomach like she's been gutshot.

"It's Hannibal," Margot states. She would not wait all night trying to wheedle it out of her wife. Alana had said absolutely nothing about Will and Hannibal since their reappearance, complete radio silence. Maybe she hoped she could pretend it wasn't happening if she could keep it out of her home.

Alana's face works and she puts the drink back down unsipped to bury her face in Margot's chest. She's sobbing again.

"I feel like I'm losing my mind."

Margot strokes her hair and tries to determine what happened to the mystery cigarette. She spies it on the deck, forgotten, and surreptitiously puts it out under her shoe.

They are at odds about Hannibal.

Margot met him as a patient four years ago, a woman who had tried to kill her brother and didn't think that was so wrong, compared to the things _he_ did.

Hannibal agreed with her.

Hannibal assumed she knew best for herself, was capable of deciding rationally if she would take the consequences of committing murder. He did not make her list things she liked about herself or give her tough-love pep talks or assign her crafts. He was the first therapist who did not try to make her feel better. Hannibal told her she had the power to _make_ things better. Hannibal encouraged her to remove the problem at the source, permanently.

She respects that deeply. Margot is a hard, cold woman when she needs to be. She has the low-boiling righteous anger of an abuse survivor, which never leaves you. She is intelligent and logical, and she saw very clearly that killing Mason was the only real solution to the problem that was her life. All of her problems were caused by Mason. And Hannibal had also seen this, and didn't bullshit her about it. That stuck with her.

The other thing is Morgan. Morgan, her Verger baby. Morgan would not exist without Dr. Lecter's assistance, and she's eternally grateful for that too.

Frankly, Dr. Lecter is in her good books, and if he should come and ring the doorbell in broad daylight right now, she'll pour him a glass of wine and apologize that it isn't an older bottle. Then she'll fetch Morgan from Alana's mother's and put her only son in Hannibal's lap and gladly watch that murdering bastard play with her infant child. She thinks Morgan will (would) love him.

She'll have a friendly but slightly awkward conversation with Will, the man who was almost the father of Morgan's older brother. As they watch his boyfriend play with a baby, she knows his responses will be distracted because his heart will be melting a little. And Margot will think, _Isn't this nice? Will won. We all won._

Alana doesn't see things that way. She thinks Alana blames herself, not just for the things that happened to Will, but all of it. Alana seems tormented by the feeling that she should have _known._ As if there was some way she could have, as if Dr. Lecter hadn't been yanking the wool down over the eyes of every person he interacted with since before she was born.

She wonders how deep she got with Lecter before the house fell in. Did she think he loved her?

Had she been in love with him?

Alana's sobs fade into hiccups, which frustrates her even further. Alana hates crying. Alana hates anything she considers a show of weakness, even alone with her wife. She reminds her of Will in that way.

Margot pats her back and says, "You better drink that drink."

"Okay." Alana drains half of it off and puts the glass down. She sighs with the exhaustion of crying.

"Baby, what is it? Is it just a lot of emotions coming up, seeing them alive?"

"No," Alana says. She doesn't elaborate.

"Then what?"

Alana won't look her in the face. "It's just...I called the head of the investigation today and they won't even take my help, not even with lives on the line. They've been leaving Jack messages begging him to just take a look at the case file and he won't return their calls. Or mine now."

"The investigation?" Margot sighs and takes a pretty big gulp of her own gin and tonic. "Alana, please don't get involved in this. You're running yourself ragged at work every day as it is, and you cannot add worrying about Will and Hannibal into the mix. You have to let them go."

Alana says nothing but looks upset.

"Alana," Margot says, "you cannot fix this. Sweetheart...you didn't break them, and you can't put them back together into the people you knew. They're gone. They're still gone. Nothing has changed. They're still dead. That's the only way to think about it that will let you sleep at night."

Alana puts her face in her hands and tears drip from them silently.

 

Freddie is joyful for more than one reason when she sees her first exclusive. It's Will and Hannibal kissing at sunset, desert wind in their hair, Will's fingers resting lightly on his lover's jaw. They're even smiling.

It's tabloid gold, but it also melts her black journalist's heart just a little bit. She wonders if she'll need to find an eligible serial killer before she gets a man who looks at her like Hannibal is looking at Will.

She examines the background. Nothing distinctive she can see. They may as well be in front of a back-projected stock image of a desert sky. She checks the location information in the photo. Nothing.

It's a go, then. Excitement fizzes in her stomach like carbonation.  

 

> _THE HONEYMOON KILLERS!! EXCLUSIVE PERSONAL PHOTO FROM MURDER HUSBANDS!_

Maybe too hokey. She'll work on the headline later. Will has conceded to her the right to run whatever copy she wanted under their photos, "within reason." She cautions herself not to push when she has it this good. The perfect scoop, handed to her on a silver platter. Plus she doesn't want to die before she gets rich.

 

> _BAD ROMANCE—Charlie and Caril Ann, Mickey and Mallory, Paul and Karla, and now the newest addition to our hallowed pantheon of killer lovers: Lecter and Graham._
> 
> _Through an exclusive arrangement with the_ _Murder Husbands_ _themselves, this reporter obtained today a photograph from the personal collection of_ very _well-preserved older man and convicted serial killer Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, 50, and sexy young fed-gone-bad lover Will Graham, 41, depicting the deadly couple sharing a loving moment in an unidentified desert location._
> 
> _Since they rose from the dead these boys have picked up quite a few admirers among hybristophiles of all genders, but we may be out of luck! From the looks of it, Lecter and Graham only have eyes for each other._
> 
> _Had he not been quite literally seduced to the dark side by Lecter's charms, Will Graham might have been part of the very investigative team currently trying to track his lover down; Graham first encountered the handsome Devil when both worked as special consultants for the FBI on the case of_ _the Minnesota Shrike, Garrett Jacob Hobbs. _
> 
> _Sources say Graham's fatal shooting of Hobbs in the course of the investigation was his first kill in the line of duty and occurred in the presence of the good Doctor—guess he saw something he liked!_
> 
> _Keep coming back to tattlecrime.com for further exclusives!_

Freddie considers what she's written.

_Laying it on too thick with the heartthrobs thing? Nah, these kids eat that shit up. They're all into edgy murder sex, it's the best angle if I'm trying for the most hits. I should start thinking about some merch. Oh, Jesus Christ, what if I could get them actually married and cover the wedding? I'd be richer than Oprah. Oh God, talk shows..._

Freddie reminds herself to calm down and be realistic. She's not the Murder Husbands' agent...yet.

 

After the pictures and dinner that night, Hannibal pulls the car behind a large rock formation on the side of the dusty road. He gets out and looks over the nighttime desert. Will joins him and they kiss a few times softly, Hannibal tilting his face up with his hand under his jaw.

Hannibal opens the door to the back of the car.

"After you," he says, inviting Will to climb in with an unnecessarily elaborate sweep of his arm.

Will grins. "Doubt it," he says teasingly under his breath as he ducks inside. Hannibal strips off his shirt before he gets in.

They kiss, Will straddling Hannibal's hips as he sits upright in the dark of the backseat. Hannibal unzips Will's jeans and his cock presses hard against Hannibal's stomach. Hannibal looks into Will's face with half-lidded eyes as he strokes his hand over it.

He helps Will out of his jeans and boxers and takes out his own erection to rock back and forth between Will's thighs, sliding along him. Will's arms wrap around his neck, he breathes in harsh bursts. Hannibal can see his face by the moonlight.

The position is pleasantly intimate: Hannibal can never bear not being able to taste Will's mouth as he fucks him, not being able to fully savor his facial expressions, his abandon, how obviously Will loves his cock inside him. Although he's asked, Will never seems to want to switch roles. That fact arouses Hannibal deeply. He loves that Will wants to be taken, fucked, vulnerable. Taken by him. He loves him here in his lap, unable to be still, wanting Hannibal's cock inside him.

"Do it," Will whispers in a gasp. Hannibal's never in much of a hurry. There's so many pleasant ways he can use Will's body without even getting inside him, and his life's work will be the compilation of an exhaustive list. But Will needs it; his cock is dripping precum and he's grinding hard up and down into Hannibal's fist, his tone approaching the edge of begging.

 _Oh, I do love the begging._ He closes his eyes and tilts his face up a little, using one hand to rub the head of his cock against the hole, circling it in the slickness of the lube, so good, so fucking sweet.

"Go down on it, slow," he tells Will, _sotto voce._ "Take it nice and slow."

Will half-moans, pushing up on Hannibal's shoulders with his forearms until the roof of the car forces him to duck his head and arc his body to give Hannibal space to line up. He lowers himself very slowly, breathing faster as Hannibal starts to enter him. Hannibal's heart is beating hard and he doesn't try to stop it; Will's face is fractions of an inch from his own as he pulls himself down on Hannibal's cock, Hannibal lays open mouth kisses along his jaw, gazing up at him from under his lids, just awed.

"Fuck," he gasps, and Will moans _"yes"_ as his cock slides deeper into him—Hannibal braces himself on the seat back, not sure he'll be able to keep supporting his own weight when he's completely inside. He thrusts up into Will the rest of the way, not gently, and puts an arm around his shoulders and another across his hips, half holding him, half guiding him. Will whimpers and holds his neck tight, biting his shoulder, breaking the skin, using his hold as leverage to bear down against Hannibal's thrusts.

 _"Will,"_ he mutters, almost dazed, "Will..." It's too much, so good and such an incredible visual, and he knows this won't be one of the longer ones. He doesn't care. They have plenty of long ones too: fucking that keeps them in bed until the sun starts to get hot in the early afternoon; between taking breaks to kiss and hold idle whispered conversations and Hannibal's near-superhuman control of his body they could go on almost literally all day and night. They've got all the time they could possibly want now, and they spend a lot of it experimenting with each other's bodies, learning every part of each other. He's been blessed with an embarrassment of riches.

Will moans, letting his head loll forward, total putty in his arms. Hannibal begins to leave gaps between the thrusts, it's coming on so rapidly and he feels close to bursting, he's aching so sweetly so low in his hips and he could swear his eyes are rolling up in his head but he can't be sure, he's being rough on Will's ass but he can't stop it, it's something like killing him and making him cum at the same time, and he knows if he ever does kill Will, it'll be like this, while he's inside him, feeling him slick and tight around his cock, the pulse in his neck beating against Hannibal's lips.

The temptation is definitely there. Sometimes when he bites Will's neck as he fucks him he has to set one track of his mind exclusively to the job of resisting the overwhelming urge to just keep going, ripping through the skin, tearing out his throat as he comes. Whether as Will comes or as _he_ does, he's not sure. That's the kind of bridge you cross when you come to it and not before.

It doesn't stop him from fantasizing about it. It would be perfect. He knows beyond a doubt that it would be the most beautiful and erotic thing he would behold in his life, maybe that anyone had ever seen, could ever possibly witness. And it would be his alone, to replay forever. Thinking about it now he moans and gives in, thrusting into Will's ass faster, pulling him in by the hair with the strong arm locked around his shoulders to whisper in his ear, "I could kill you right now. You would be unrecognizable. They'd use your dental records to identify the corpse."

"Oh, talk dirty to me, Dr. Lecter," Will moans half-sarcastically, laughing.

Hannibal cums at that moment, gripping Will tight against his body, ramming into him with a low groan as he fills him up, muscles standing out in his arms from the effort. Will cries out, twisting against his chest, squeezing his neck hard enough to give a bit of extra frisson to the already incomparable experience of pumping cum into Will's body.

Hannibal just huffs hot breath into Will's collar bone for a minute or two, neither of them loosening their grips, Will still very slowly sliding his hips back and forth on his cock. He's always ready for his turn as soon as Hannibal is, and Hannibal is only too happy to oblige him. Now he tilts Will away from his body slightly with the arm around his shoulders, slipping his hand around Will's cock and jerking it fast, base to tip.

"Someday I may not be kidding," Hannibal whispers hoarsely, wetting his lips as he rests his forehead against Will's.

"I know," through his sharp intakes of breath, a strange look in his eyes, rolling his hips up on each of Hannibal's downstrokes. "Don't... _think...I..._ don't... _know..."_

His jaw drops and he's silent for a moment and then he says _"yes, yes, oh, oh my God"_ and Hannibal kisses Will fiercely as he climaxes on his chest.

"Perhaps you should bring that up to your therapist," Hannibal says, and Will snorts. "I would be concerned for any patient of mine with such a sexual interest in their own death."

"Fuck off," says Will fondly. "Do we still have any cigarettes?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's. up. my. friends. I'm excited about this one. I think this is possibly the best sex scene I've ever written lol. Or at least it's my new favorite.
> 
> Please comment and add me at stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com!! Also thanks again to Fresh Meat Friday and fragile-teacup for nominating me to the collection AGAIN for Honeymoon (and this a little too). I'm dying!!!


	4. 1 Apocrypha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Static, crackling, clothing shifting, distorted voices. The unmistakable sounds of an assdial. Freddie moves to hit the end call button, then on instinct looks at the caller ID. "Unknown." Usually her unknown calls come from burner phones. This could be something worth listening to.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is not really its own chapter, just a little something that occurred to me but seemed like it might stop the flow of a proper chapter. Bonus round! Freddie might be married to her work, but she's not a nun. lol
> 
> Please comment if you like and add me at stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com!

In the middle of the night, Freddie Lounds wakes to the trill of her phone. The ringer is never off. She fumbles for it in the dark and yawns, "Freddie Lounds."

Static, crackling, clothing shifting, distorted voices. The unmistakable sounds of an assdial. She moves to hit the end call button, then on instinct looks at the caller ID. "Unknown." Usually her unknown calls come from burner phones. This could be something worth listening to.

She holds the phone to her ear again. It sounds like torture, or sex, or both. She wonders who was unlucky enough to roll over on their phone in the heat of passion and accidentally call the nosiest woman on earth.

Her answer in the form of Will Graham's voice, strained near to cracking: "Do it."

Freddie groggily listens to Will and Hannibal fucking somewhere out there in this big beautiful country, wracking her still-sleeping brain for a way to monetize what she's hearing.

"Go down on it, slow," Hannibal now, and _that_ wakes her up a little, that soft but commanding growl.

_Oh, boy._ Freddie's free hand creeps under the blanket, slips into her panties, brushes over her clit. _Ooh, Freddie, if they realize you can hear..._

Dr. Lecter is getting noises out of Will Graham that are tingling her spine, and she rubs herself with two fingertips, letting herself breathe in time with Will, imagining Hannibal's cock as deep in her pussy as it must be in Will right now. She feels a little dirty, a little scared, very turned on.

She thinks back to the picture taken through the motel room window, Hannibal's graceful six-foot frame across the bloody sheets, Will sleeping with his head on Hannibal's chest, Hannibal's arm over his back. She'd taken her time on that censorship job.

Freddie is the kind of strong-willed woman who occasionally likes to let an equally strong-willed man push her around in bed. Truth be told, Hannibal Lecter had always pinged that particular target in her. _Dr._ Lecter. Mm. She couldn't really blame Will for cutting his wife loose to get in on that. _The man is a literal cannibal,_ she reminds herself. It doesn't help.

Freddie grinds against her hand to the soundtrack of Will's bouncing gasps, thinking about the picture, Hannibal's lean but muscled swimmer's body, his appealingly graying stubble and chest hair, the thick uncut cock laid heavy across his thigh. _Europeans._ She lets herself play out little scenarios in her mind: Dr. Lecter fucking her rough over the arm of the couch in his office to punish her for recording Will's therapy; interviewing Dr. Lecter in the hospital and jerking him off under the table he's handcuffed to; ooh, why not, a risky but thrilling liaison with both of them in some nowhere motel, a tangle of limbs, sucking Hannibal's cock while Will fucks her from behind, pressed sweaty and panting between them...

_I really need to get another boyfriend,_ Freddie muses.

When she hears Hannibal's deep climactic groan she comes suddenly, catching herself just in time before she makes any noise that could be heard on the other end of the line. She can't make out their conversation, but shortly Will takes the Lord's name in vain in a way that tells her the show's over. She hangs up and snuggles back into her comforter, hoping they don't happen to check outgoing calls for any reason.

Freddie Lounds drifts back towards sleep, dreaming of sitting on Dr. Lecter's face, imagining how that eloquent tongue would feel slipping into her pussy. _Bet it'd be worth the gamble,_ she thinks.


	5. 4 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal is watching him from across the campfire when he awakes with a start.
> 
> The fire is small, but in this great expanse it seems tiny, casting strange shadows across the sand. Hannibal does not react to his panicked awakening; he's seen it many times, and he knows what it means.
> 
> Will wipes the sweat from his forehead ineffectively—he's drenched—and sits up. He looks back at Hannibal, still watching him.
> 
> Firelight has always suited Hannibal, in Will's opinion. Dancing orange flames lick across his features from below, and the effect is appropriately demonic. Sometimes he needs the reminder of who exactly he's decided to sleep with.

> _I'm unclean_   
>  _A libertine_   
>  _And every time you vent your spleen_   
>  _I seem to lose the power of speech_   
>  _You're slipping slowly from my reach_   
>  _You grow me like an evergreen_   
>  _You've never seen the lonely me at all_   
>  _I take the plan, spin it sideways_   
>  _I fall_   
>  _Without you I'm nothing_   
>  _Without you I'm nothing_   
>  _Without you I'm nothing_   
>  _Without you I'm nothing at all_
> 
> _—Placebo, "Without You I'm Nothing"_

 

_Molly does not come to court. Only Will, looking something close to haggard, shrinking in his clothes against the hard wooden bench. Across the expanse between them Hannibal smells cheap aftershave, and cheap whiskey, fresh on his breath._

_And Will, Will's own good smell. It sustains him through the tedium of the trial, although it makes his stomach sour and his chest ache._

_Hannibal learns of Molly, sees her for the first time, in Tattle Crime's print coverage of the trial. His copy is a loose collection of pages. The staples were removed before he was allowed to have it._

_Hannibal examines her face minutely in the photos. She has a mothering look, kindly but no-nonsense, blonde with bangs, soft round face. To Hannibal she looks much older than Will._

_This woman is now Will Graham's wife. He took her hand in a_ church _and pledged to love her for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, 'til death do us part._

Love _her._

_He sees exactly what Will is trying to do, and that makes it even more offensive in his eyes._

_There is a boy. That needles him too._

_Hannibal stretches his long legs under the bolted-down table. This early in his life behind glass, Dr. Chilton looks after him, and now Chilton is eyeing him apprehensively. He's been waiting for Hannibal to speak for half an hour. Hannibal does not wish to speak with him today._

_He stands and stretches again, uncomfortable in his ill-fitting jumpsuit, and lays down on his hard bed, facing the wall. Chilton mutters angrily to himself as he leaves, things he probably thinks Hannibal can't hear. There'll be time for that._

_He does not feel quite himself. He hasn't for some time now. Even with Will gone from him, the feeling he created in Hannibal remains behind like a bastard child._

Someday I will watch him kill her, _he decides, and that cheers him up a little. He experiences nothing so petty as jealousy. He knows that Will is his. Will just has to realize it too._

_And then the fun can start._

 

The picture goes up, and that very afternoon Freddie Lounds is taken in for questioning. She is surprised when the agent grilling her reminds her that the Robinsons left this world only five days ago. _Time flies when you're making money._

She tells him nothing, because she has nothing to tell, and gloats as technicians examine the file. The perfect crime.

Freddie Lounds has hit the jackpot, while the investigators continue to lose. Hannibal Lecter knows exactly how to make them look like fools, and she can't tell them what she doesn't know. Every lead tentatively offered up by the investigation in the straight press has collapsed under the slightest pressure. It would appear Hannibal, as usual, is having his fun.

The murders thus far don't follow the MO of any confirmed to have been committed by Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Every victim has been found with missing organs or flesh, but there the similarities end. None of them are meticulously staged post-mortem as many of Lecter's victims had been. The Ripper was choosy and careful; these are sudden brutal deaths, only hours apart.

As she drives home Freddie wonders a little about the selection process herself. The Robinsons had lived in Marathon. Freddie vaguely recalls that this is where Will's stepson and wife reside.

 _More like his beard._ Something tells her nothing as exciting as what she overheard last night ever occurred in the Grahams' marital bed.

Molly had to be lead by the nose but she had answered the cops' questions, if brusquely. Neither she nor Will had known the Robinsons. She claims to have had no contact with Will since his disappearance. She is mentioned in the press under her maiden name.

Perhaps the Robinsons were last-minute substitutes, dying so the ex-Grahams did not have to. Whether the bad blood was between Graham and Molly or Molly and Dr. Homewrecker she could not say, but someone decided against it and the Robinsons took one for the team. Molly never knew they were in town until they were gone.

As far as the clerk in Alabama, he had obviously been either too observant or too rude. No mystery there.

The Hoopers, she doesn't know. The Hoopers were two very uninteresting old people who lived on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Most likely were the only actually random victims so far. Road trips do get boring after a while.

Freddie's life is currently far from boring. In the five days since Marathon, entire diehard legions of Murder Husbands fans have suddenly cropped up, and _Tattle Crime_ is the epicenter of the resulting quake. Traffic is flowing to the site from hundreds of fawning blogs and Facebook groups, some created in the last week, some older and converted over from a focus on the Chesapeake Ripper or general true-crime.

Most true-crime hobbyists are harmless, but their websites and events attract murder groupies. Freddie has dealt with them many times. They come with the territory. Some people just love murderers, get turned on by the power and sadism. However these kids, and most _are_ kids, are rabid. That reminds her of something she wants to get done.

When she gets home, she picks up her phone and recruits her reluctant cameraman and lighting guy to help her pare down her choked inbox, sweetening the deal with offers of tequila and pizza. Why not, she can afford to buy her employees' love now.

It takes all afternoon and into the night. The messages run the gamut from embarrassing to appalling to hilarious to just generally weird, and they end up inventing a drinking game to drown out the horror of some of the more gory or amorous emails and letters. _Who are these people who always send letters?_

One is a woman from Idaho, a stay-at-home mother of three, who writes with an impassioned plea to share her story as a "warning to others." She claims Will and Hannibal were about to send her to her Maker when she appeased them with her body instead, to her eternal shame. She includes a detailed account of that part. Freddie is not sure what the woman intends to "warn" people about, exactly, but she publishes it anyway. All publicity is good publicity. Will will have to understand that.

Then there are the sightings, every day from every corner of every state, naming dozens of different vehicles, differing in descriptions of appearance. Some people probably actually want to help; others are pranksters, nuts, or conspiracy theorists. People are also calling her all hours of the day and night claiming to be either Will or Hannibal. The first dozen times it's very entertaining.

But her absolute favorite remains the many, many younger ones who send breathless teen-magazine-style questions meant not for her, but Will and Hannibal directly. As she reads she texts Will on today's burner number to share the funnier ones:

"Dr. Lecter: Will you be my prom date?" _He says he's deeply flattered but he has nothing to wear._

"Will, I think you are so cute, can you pretty please stop in my town and kill my dad?" _Well, now I will. Just kidding (probably)._

"Dear Hannibal, what's your favorite way to kill someone?" _His hands._

She eventually convinces him to let her post them, and the last one causes such pandemonium in the comment section that tattlecrime.com actually crashes under the rapid influx of traffic.

In celebration, Freddie Lounds uses her copious advertising revenue to order a new, _real_ Miu Miu bag.

 

_They do not wait. There is no time. There may never be another time. It happens almost as soon as they reach the house on the cliff. Will has reservations; he always has reservations. But when their lips touch, there's no going back._

_They kiss, finally they kiss, and the way Hannibal runs his hands over his body in that unfamiliar bedroom brings to Will's mind St. Thomas examining the wounds of Christ. Supplicating, awed, apologetic. But maybe his mind embroiders it that way: he feels more than a little unreal, finally experiencing something that has been the subject of his thoughts, fantasies, and dreams for four years. No wonder Hannibal wants to make sure he's really here. Really back from the dead._

_That's how it felt when he saw Hannibal there in his cell: like a resurrection. During his three years in purgatory he has imagined every way it could happen, every when, every where. Now the moment to step Upstairs is here, and Will had counted on being terrified, but not on feeling so awkwardly virginal._

_It's nerve-wracking, but the blessing of his inexperience also thrills him a little: there is a way to be touched that no one has ever touched him before, and he wants Hannibal to be the first and the last._

_Whatever it takes will be worth that._

_Will expects pain. He's not disappointed. It hurts. That's good. It's bracing. He is present every moment. It's_ right _that it hurts; the introduction of Hannibal into his very body_ should _hurt. It's cleansing pain, purifying him for his afterlife, whether it turns out to be literal or figurative._

_Hannibal, unimaginably gentle, murmurs soft instructions to him, telling him to relax, breathe, let go. He tries, slow breaths and quick heartbeat, three beats to the breath. Hannibal holds him to his chest and kisses his forehead, his cheek, his mouth, his eyelids as he pushes forward into him._

_It's better when he's all the way inside. Will's head swims; it's so strange, to be the one entered, not entering._ This is what it's like to have another person inside you. _He feels something like cognitive dissonance in his thinking about himself._

 _And it's so hard to believe Hannibal is inside him, finally, literally. The pleasure is entirely mental at first, just the knowledge that Hannibal is_ inside _him._

_Little by little, though, it feels better, and better, and then it's so good and he never ever wants to be just one person again._

"Oh Jesus, oh God," _he whispers with his lips pressed to Hannibal's ear, and he's truly praying._

_Hannibal telling him simple, sweet things in a low voice as he moves inside him, telling Will how he looks to him, how he feels to him, and then he says, "I love you."_

_Will says, "I love you too."_

 

It's a memory, a dream, a re-experiencing. Will's dreams are amorphous and far-reaching, they creep into every corner of his head like clinging vines, breaking up the mortar. Sometimes he gets mixed up about what happened in a dream and what just happened here in good old reality.

He dreams things that happened here over and over; here things happen sometimes that seem to have been oddly foretold by some dream he can't quite remember.

The dream changes.

 

_Standing in his bedroom in Sugarloaf Key. Not his, Molly's. It was never his, she slept in this bed without him before he came into her life and she still sleeps in it now that he's dead. She is in it now. She is not sleeping._

_Molly's arms are tied behind her back. Her ankles are tied together. She is not gagged, but she does not speak, merely looks at him with tears in her eyes._

_"What will you do, Will?"_

_Hannibal is standing beside him._

_He doesn't know what he'll do. But the dream lurches forward and he's doing it, on top of her, pressing the knife to her throat. Still she says nothing, crying silently. Will wants something to say but there isn't anything._

_The knife is serrated and only two firm sawing strokes are needed to sever every blood vessel in her throat._

 

Hannibal is watching him from across the campfire when he awakes with a start.

The fire is small, but in this great expanse it seems tiny, casting strange shadows across the sand. Hannibal does not react to his panicked awakening; he's seen it many times, and he knows what it means.

Will wipes the sweat from his forehead ineffectively—he's drenched—and sits up. He looks back at Hannibal, still watching him.

Firelight has always suited Hannibal, in Will's opinion. Dancing orange flames lick across his features from below, and the effect is appropriately demonic. Sometimes he needs the reminder of who exactly he's decided to sleep with.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," Will says.

"You will eventually."

This is irritatingly accurate.

"It's Molly," he says. "I was dreaming that...I was with Molly."

"Killing her?"

Will does not reply.

"You wanted to kill her as soon as you saw her. You took the others instead. Why?"

"Hannibal."

"Do you know?"

"Hannibal, I will not do this."

Will stands up and pulls on his boots, kicking the sand as he trudges away into the dark. Hannibal watches him go, expressionless.

The games have been getting a little too tame for his liking. He's been rooting around during his driving shifts, pulling out half-finished amusements and setting aside the ones he'd like to see through. Killing again is stirring something in him, something which doesn't exactly sleep but waits and blinks in the dark.

 

_In Sugarloaf Key, looking down on Molly's house, Hannibal scents Will's urge to murder her right away as she exits the pickup with her child and new man. He initially mistakes it for arousal; the aromas are very similar, but the lust for killing has a more metallic edge than the sexual variety. When Will wants things rough, even bloody, in bed, Hannibal is always forewarned by the extra touch of copper in the smell of his desire. He still waits until he needs it bad enough to ask, of course._

_Right now, Hannibal hopes for Will's sake he is correct in his determination between the two, and Will kindly confirms his suspicions immediately._

_"I want to do it tonight," he says in the car, before they even pull away._

_"In Marathon?"_

_Will has somehow gone from reasonably put together to rumpled all over, as if his state of mind is projecting on to his appearance. It reminds Hannibal of a cat's puffed-up threat display._

_"Yes. No kids. Drive into the suburbs."_

_Since "kill him" has been tentatively stricken from his playbook as far as options for solving Will's problems_ (see also _"Problems caused by Will,"_ pgs. 5, 18, 19, 25, 32) _, Hannibal says nothing and merely drives at a snail's pace both to and through the Marathon suburbs, making sure to perfectly observe all traffic laws and behave with excessive care around police cars. Dating Will has brought out a rather passive-aggressive streak in him._

_"There," Will says, pointing to a random house at the end of one street._

_It transpires that the house is currently occupied by an older couple and their three adult offspring. No children. They take the first one, a female in her twenties, when she re-enters the kitchen from the back yard to fetch her mother's phone, which she thinks is ringing inside._

_The ringtone is her mother's, but the phone is not. While staking out the house from the car, they had heard the mother's phone go off with one of the standard pre-downloaded rings and watched her come back outside without it in her hand._

_Eventually the mother comes to find her. They fall on her together like dogs. She screams, and that draws the rest of them. Will gets behind the last one and blocks the door, Hannibal stands between them and the living room. What used to be the daughter and mother bleeds silently on the linoleum._

 

Jack has done the unthinkable: he has bought a copy of _Tattle Crime._ He tells himself this is professional interest, not morbid curiosity.

Will's faintly sarcastic answers to his groupies' burning questions make him laugh out loud despite himself. _Never did like being poked at._

He thinks accepting what Will and Hannibal are and not fussing over it like Alana is a reasonable attitude to take, at least for someone who knew them and thought of them as people as they do, but when he's glad for their obvious happiness as a couple for an instant it leaves him feeling guilty. Even after all this time in law enforcement, he doesn't know how you're supposed to feel about someone you cared about after they do the unthinkable.

It kicks up something in his mind about domestic violence victims who go back to their abusers which makes him uncomfortable. He sets the magazine on a decorative pillow and crosses his arms, his eternal hard-mental-labor-in-progress stance.

He wishes for Bella. He wants to talk about it with Bella, and be understood. Alana thinks he's nuts. Price and Zeller, they aren't talking friends. Bev—

His mind snaps shut on the name and his face darkens.

The worst thing is that Beverly would have loved this. She would've never stopped screeching if she'd laid eyes on the cover photo of the magazine on the pillow next to him.

His stomach clenches in the way it does when you feel someone's absence sharply a long time after they're gone.

"My God, what a mess," Jack says to no one.

 

Alana is making her morning app notification rounds in bed when she sees the picture.

"Oh my God," she says out loud, and Margot mumbles sleepily, "What is it, baby?"

She laughs when she sees it, not remembering right away what happened on the porch yesterday. "That's sweet. Dr. Lecter has it bad. I didn't think he was the type."

"This is _obscene,"_ Alana says. Her hands are shaking.

Margot remembers. _Oh._

"Obscene is a...strong word," she says, stalling for time.

"I feel strongly."

"Alana..."

"Just—fucking—don't," Alana says, scrambling to her feet. She's teary and her cheeks are red. Margot's stomach sinks. "Just you and everyone just...call me when you're sane again." She grabs an assortment of clothing off the floor and locks herself in the bathroom.

 _Kind of ableist for the inmate running the asylum,_ Margot Verger, veteran of asylums, reflects. She feels petty for picking at Alana now, even where she can't hear it. There is obviously something else here. There has to be. She knows Alana carries the world on her shoulders whenever possible, but it can't just be that, can it? What is she afraid of?

Alana is showing all the symptoms of hiding something, something possibly quite large. A wife knows.

Once Dr. Lecter had helped her help herself by supporting her instinct to cut to the center of knots. _If Mason is the problem, and the problem must be removed, then I remove Mason._ Perhaps this is another issue easily solvable by directness.

Margot makes coffee and begins the laborious process of composing a multi-paragraph email while simultaneously wrangling a four year old.

 

Alana grips the steering wheel hard as she drives to work. _No—wait._

At the next light she makes an illegal U-turn and heads to Dr. Chilton's house. She stops at a Giant and buys a small flower arrangement, then realizes what she's doing: _He's better now._ It's been hard to teach herself think of what Dr. Chilton now is as "better."

She puts the flowers in her passenger seat and decides she'll give them to Margot later. Margot won't say anything about the yelling and she wants to acknowledge it.

Dr. Chilton's live-in nurse answers the door and looks at her suspiciously. Alana doesn't think she's ever met the woman, so maybe everyone who's come to the door since she's worked here has given her reason to be suspicious in the future. She's sure there's been enough attempted gawkers.

She introduces herself haltingly as a colleague and is trying to find a reason she can give for being here when Dr. Chilton calls from inside, "It's alright, Alice. Let her in." Well, not exactly _calls._

Alice takes a step back and Alana enters. All the bulbs must be on dimmers: the interior is fogged with half-light. She thinks about Mason Verger's chambers at Muskrat Farm, the big four-poster bed in the dark.

She guesses that, although Dr. Chilton still has the use of the eye that survived his unfortunate facial rearrangement, it was weakened by the fire Francis Dolarhyde set on him, and therefore he lights his house very low. Alana thinks it would be unkind to assume he just doesn't want people to be able to see him very well.

Dr. Frederick Chilton is reading at his desk when she enters his first-floor office and library. She has seen him enough times since he...recovered that she has no facial reaction to his appearance. However, she does bump into a chair when he looks up.

 _He noticed. Fuck._ Alana says, "Hello, Dr. Chilton."

"Hello." He doesn't put his book down, evidently to make her believe she isn't important enough for him to do so, but after a moment of silence he gets tired of holding it. "How can I help you today, Dr. Bloom? You did not call."

"No," she says. _Uh._ "I wanted to...discuss something."

"Something."

"Yes," says Alana, wishing that she could just treat him with open contempt like she always has. She feels guilty hating someone so unlucky.

"Well, come in, I suppose." He flicks a hand at a leather armchair by his window. "Would you like Alice to fix you a drink?"

"It's...ten A.M.," Alana says uncertainly. Chilton shrugs and says to Alice, who is still standing in the hall openly eavesdropping, "Just me, Alice." She shuffles away.

To Alana he says, "Are you shocked?" in a way that sounds like he hopes she is.

Alana purses her lips. Instead of answering, she says, "I need to talk to you about Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooh this one took a bit to figure out, because I have officially reached the end of the part where I know where this is...actually going haha. So hold on to yourselves because I know the beginning and the end but not the in-between.
> 
> Also you guys, I just really love Chilton, I love writing him and I love writing how much everyone hates him. I hope you're also excited about Chilton being involved in this lol.
> 
> PLEASE comment and follow me at stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com!


	6. 5 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Do you know why everyone feels compelled to compare Dr. Lecter to the Devil?"
> 
> Alana searches Dr. Chilton's patchwork face for the answer he wants to hear, assuming he has some little bon mot stored up, but she answers honestly. "I suppose it's the same reason people call Adolf Hitler evil, as if he were a supernatural force. They want to distance themselves, remove him from the species they belong to."
> 
> "People see Dr. Lecter as inhumanly, even demonically, evil, yes. But they have the right comparison for the wrong reason: Hannibal isn't evil personified—he's temptation. The Devil merely tempts us into evil, Dr. Bloom. We carry out the deed ourselves."
> 
> He sits back, savoring his own turn of phrase. "So you see...while Dr. Lecter may have offered all of us forbidden knowledge, only Will Graham was tempted enough to take a bite. Even when it meant being run out of Eden on a rail. There was something in Will for him to catch on to."

> _I want to hold the hand inside you_  
>  _I want to take a breath that's true_  
>  _I look to you and I see nothing_  
>  _I look to you to see the truth_  
>  _You live your life_  
>  _You go in shadows_  
>  _You'll come apart and you'll go blind_  
>  _Some kind of night into your darkness  
>  __Colors your eyes with what's not there_  
> 
> _Fade into you_  
>  _Strange you never knew_  
>  _Fade into you  
>  __I think it's strange you never knew_  
> 
> _—Mazzy Star, "Fade Into You"_

 

Dr. Frederick Chilton is a man in shambles. His body is a crime scene several times over, his modifications the handiwork of famous monsters. His gutting, his face, he can blame on Hannibal Lecter, somehow, someway. But his skin...his _skin_ was taken from him by Will Graham. Dr. Abel Gideon, Miriam Lass, Francis Dolarhyde were all merely agents of the chaos that is the intersection of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham.

The current climate is not improving Dr. Chilton's view of Lecter and Graham. He has nothing now. They have everything. They have things they don't even want. Those... _murderers,_ those  _lunatics_ are soaking the panties of every little girl in America, and he knows they will never touch a one of them, too busy sucking each other's dicks for publicity.

Dr. Chilton tends to assume that other people's motives are similar to his own.

"Those boys?" he says now, nonchalantly, as if he hadn't heard the names in years. "What about them?"

"You expressed interest to me once about doing something about them."

"Yes, and you turned me down in favor of the late Mason Verger. Are you drawn to the _disfigured,_ Dr. Bloom?"

Alana crooks her mouth to one side. "You're not Hannibal, Frederick. What was it you said about Gideon? You felt like you were 'fumbling with his head like a freshman at a pantygirdle'? Your moves aren't much smoother."

Now that he has insulted her, the conversation is moving more easily for Alana. Back in familiar territory.

Chilton picks up his book again. He seems to be fidgeting a lot these days.

"Dr. Bloom, Alana, you may think I have very little left to lose, but what I have left, I _need._ You, all of you, seem to keep forgetting"—he slips into present tense, snapping right back to where this farce left off—"that you _cannot beat Hannibal._ Over and over I watched people explain to you this simple fact. Will Graham knew it the whole time. He may be the smartest of us all."

Although Dr. Chilton does not clarify who "us" is, Alana knows immediately that he means their motley fraternity of those unfortunate enough to interest Hannibal. Privately she thinks of them as the Losers Club.

"Yes, Mr. Graham was smart enough to see that he could not beat him, so he joined him," Chilton continues. "Too bad _your_ application was turned down. You would be on the cover of a magazine right now."

Alana's face burns. She had thought she was used to it: the constant jabs, the snickering, the stares from strangers and colleagues alike. For a long time she's been able to let them roll off her back, but in her current state of mind the reminder that _everyone in the country_ knows she slept with escaped mental patient Hannibal Lecter is particularly galling coming from _the man responsible_ for passing out that knowledge.

She thinks of Morgan and clenches the anger into her jaw. She can't do this alone.

"I don't envy Will Graham," she says. "I doubt he's having as much fun as Hannibal may be having him advertise. If they've really been hiding out in some... _love nest_ this whole time, maybe now that he sees Hannibal killing he's starting to remember what he is. Maybe he'll do my job for me."

"Oh, Dr. Bloom. Do you think he is just _watching?"_

Alana stops. She had. Until now. She realizes that she's been assuming Will is not an active participant in the murders, just along for Hannibal's ride.

This new angle creates a minor paradigm shift in her thinking, like tilting a holographic trading card. She can't put her finger on why things seem to look different, but they do.

"Oh, you _did,"_ Chilton discovers with delight. "You treat that man like a crippled puppy, Alana. Dr. Bloom, I mean. Can't do anything right, but he _means_ well, and he just looks so cute every time he pisses on the rug."

"Will is dead," she says. _He's dead. He's dead._

"Oh, no. Will is alive and kicking. I expect he is getting plenty of exercise with Dr. Lecter, too."

Chilton may be pulling a face. "That man...sickening. While under my care he dropped his mask of sophistication and showed himself to be just as... _lascivious_ as any of the brain-dead compulsive masturbators out in the general population. Sex maniac. Will deserves our pity."

Alana finds his choice of the word _lascivious_ to be disturbing, and telling, and also fairly difficult to watch.

"Did he turn the charm on you, Frederick? He can be _very_ charming. Afraid to see him and find out he doesn't think you're pretty anymore?"

"You _are_ upset," Dr. Chilton comments coolly, and Alana actually feels a little ashamed. Chilton has plenty of terrible features without bringing his ruined appearance into it.

After a pause, Dr. Chilton says, "The problem, Dr. Bloom, is that you refuse to see that Will Graham is Will Graham is Will Graham. He has always been the man he is now; he has always been essentially capable of the things he is capable of now. Mr. Graham is not a damsel in distress, Dr. Bloom. Aside from some minor soreness, I assume he is living the high life now. He is a _celebrity."_

"Will wouldn't have enjoyed being a celebrity," Alana says quietly, as if Chilton had insulted his memory.

"You do not know that. Will _Lecter-_ Graham, or whatever he might begin wishing to call himself now that Ms. Lounds has apparently pronounced them man and wife, is the same man you knew. You cannot separate the person from the actions."

"This isn't about Will." _Even though it feels like it is now._ "This is about giving the Devil his due, and making it stick this time."

"Do you know why everyone feels compelled to compare Dr. Lecter to the Devil?"

Alana searches his patchwork face for the answer he wants to hear, assuming he has some little _bon mot_ stored up, but she answers honestly. "I suppose it's the same reason people call Adolf Hitler evil, as if he were a supernatural force. They want to distance themselves, remove him from the species they belong to."

"People see Dr. Lecter as inhumanly, even demonically, evil, yes. But they have the right comparison for the wrong reason: Hannibal isn't evil personified—he's _temptation._ The Devil merely tempts us into evil, Dr. Bloom. We carry out the deed ourselves."

He sits back, savoring his own turn of phrase. "So you see...while Dr. Lecter may have offered all of us forbidden knowledge, only Will Graham was tempted enough to take a bite. Even when it meant being run out of Eden on a rail. There was something in Will for him to catch on to."

Alana becomes aware that she never sat when offered a chair earlier and does so now. She taps her cane against the floor as she thinks.

"Regardless, Hannibal isn't the literal Devil," she says at last. "He's human, and he bleeds. He must have an Achilles heel."

"You mean aside from his ridiculously bloated ego? I suppose it is possible. Personally, I was not altogether convinced of his humanity until I saw that _picture_ in Lounds' rag. Fame whoring is an eminently human trait."

This morning Alana had called it _obscene,_ but Chilton mocking Will and Hannibal's kiss seems more tasteless to her now than the picture. She would prefer to keep hating it, but she did always sincerely want Will to be happy. Can she hate him for being happy now, if she was ever really his friend?

Suddenly she has it.

"So is love," she says slowly. "He's in love. He never cared about anyone but himself before. Caring is a weakness."

"Caring." Chilton makes the connection she just made. "Will Graham is his weakness."

"Yes, Frederick. That's how we'll get him."

"Your scheme has one flaw. What makes you think Hannibal is really in love with Will?"

Alana stares at him. "You think he would fake all this?"

"I am sure I do not know. What looks like wasted time to us could be hours of entertainment to such a _man_ as Dr. Lecter. Who could know what goes on in his head?"

Would Hannibal really do that? Alana thinks it over seriously, wanting to consider every angle before making a move. If they think he cares about Will more than he actually does, any plan on the premise is worthless, and possibly deadly.

"If anyone could, it would be Will," she says. "I don't think he'd fall for it."

 

_Why do I want to kill Molly?_

Will is still walking. When he turns, the fire is a blinking orange dot in the black. Probably far enough. He wants to think, not get lost and starve to death out here.

He sits down on the cold sand and reaches for his phone, finding a pint of Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey instead. _Great._ He unscrews the cap.

Hannibal's mind is becoming oppressive lately, perhaps the last day or two. Will feels his mind always, even when he himself doesn't realize, but close physical proximity boosts his signal. In the house by the water they had some space, not much, but more than the distance between the driver and passenger seats.

He takes a warming gulp of Woodford Reserve.

He has begun to see Hannibal's thoughts as dark vines veining up the trellis of his mind, weaving through the diamonds, and sometimes the tendrils choke him, squeezing his brain python-like until he starts to lose track of himself. He does not think Hannibal is doing it consciously, but that means he can't ask him to stop.

But he can always walk away (almost always), and out here he can breathe for a while. And drink.

"Hello, darkness, my old friend," Will says out loud. _Or old habit._ The darkness is certainly close enough to hear him right now.

He looks up, as is his tendency when thinking things out or trying to, and is greeted by a beautiful blanket of clear stars. _No light pollution out here._ It was this way in Sugarloaf Key too, and at the house. He had thought that clear stars meant good things for him.

 

_Things are good with Molly. They really are. Molly is more than most men deserve, and Will is no exception. Maybe that he's why he's unhappy, though: Molly is more than he deserves, the house is more than he deserves, Walter, the dogs, even fucking Florida is too good for him._

_It isn't a self-esteem issue; it's the_ betrayal. _Over and over it haunts him. Betraying the plan to leave to Jack. Betraying Hannibal and his own feelings by asking him to leave his life. And then finally, betraying Molly in thought if not deed._

Faithless, _is the word that comes to mind when he thinks of it. Every day he thinks of how right Hannibal had been. Hannibal saw him transforming, its possibility, deep in his breast on the first day they met._

_Now he feels arrested, mis-matched and awkward: the different pieces of his personality, halted at various stages in their chemical reaction to Hannibal, no longer hold together correctly. He is too angry or too sad or too tired to ever do anything with Molly that she wants them to do. His brokenness is not Hannibal's doing. It is the lack of him that left him stuck fully-formed in the eggshell._

_Something was happening, and now it's stopped, and he can't take deep breaths anymore without his chest aching horribly with how badly he needs Hannibal in his life. If it had been anything but the deepest obsession he would have been long since moved on by the final days of his time with Molly and Walter._

_Instead he has begun to develop a bit of a drinking problem. Actually, he has begun to implement a bit of a drinking problem that has been incubating in him all his adult life._

_He thought the nightmares and the seeing things and the moments where everything is paused would stop when he turned his back on Baltimore—foolish. Stupid. He can never leave._

_Will Graham feels keenly the knowledge that he is crazy. It never really leaves you. Every thought, decision, impression, word you second-guess, knowing it is coming from a crazy person. This is what his rarefied colleagues in the Behavioral Science Unit, who only study people like him and do not really know what it means to experience it, call "internalized ableism." He knows he must be crazy because he understands what it means and can label it when he sees himself doing it._

_Will had never wanted to be "real FBI" until after he realized fully what it meant, that he could only lend his expert testimony on what any given crazy person might do, not actually catch him. Oh, no. We know. "It takes one to catch one," right? You're on the other side of the line, we're us and you're them. We can't pin a badge on that._

_Sadly for Molly her marriage to him coincides with the first air he can take in after holding his breath for—two? is it two? time is slippery to him—two years, holding his breath since he met Hannibal. And that gasp opens the floodgates._

_Every night in his dreams he wanders the rooms of Hannibal's house, sometimes as it was then, sometimes as it must be now, dim and stale, all the furniture draped in dust clothes that make him think of grave shrouds. In the dreams he looks for Hannibal, knowing from the start he isn't there. He's gone. Will told him to go._

_Sometimes his footsteps echo in the vast negative spaces of the Behavioral Science Unit instead. It is always deserted and always blindingly bright. Working there he had never been able to quite shake the implacable sensation of being miles underground, in some kind of secret bunker or futuristic mausoleum. In his dreams sometimes he goes to the cold chambers in the morgue and pulls body cold storage drawers one after another, afraid each time he'll find Beverley or Abigail or Jack or Molly. Sometimes he does._

_Some days in the waking world he is defeated by 2 PM (sometimes earlier), and he stakes out a spot in one corner of the porch and drinks bourbon in the winter or gin and tonics in the summer until he is shamefully drunk. Molly leaves him alone and forbids Walter to go near him. She never says anything, but she hates it. It's always very clear when Molly really, truly hates things he does because she refuses to acknowledge them._

_Anything less than pure hatred on her part starts good wholesome fights followed by reasonably pleasant make-up sex. Sometimes when he's tied one on like that he will cry a little, silently, late at night, and if  Molly sees him at it she is not so heartless as to ignore him then. She always says the same things, rubbing his back:_

_"It's okay now, it's over," or "you're safe," or "we're all safe," or "you never have to go back," or "I love you," or "I'm proud of what you did."_

_He doesn't want to think about never going back. He doesn't want to think about Molly loving him, not in this state of mind. He does not want to think about it being over._

_It isn't always hell, but it's hell. Occasionally he toys with the idea that he actually is dead and burning in hell, then he remembers Georgia Madchen and has to double over on his rocking chair and grip handfuls of his hair until the urge to scream fades._

_Molly allows him his brooding and his self-medication but every few months she tries to get him to "see someone," and Will just cannot. It's just out of the question. He cannot walk into a therapist's office knowing he will be greeted by someone other than Hannibal or he thinks he will well and truly lose it. He can't go to a therapist and talk about Hannibal and tell him how he cries when he gets plastered not because he is exactly as crazy as ever but because it means nothing now._

_He knows immediately how it would sound to this standard-issue therapist: Hannibal gave his life a dangerous amount of meaning. He knows it was incredibly unhealthy, a sick obsession with a man now known to be a murderer and cannibal, a man who had power over him and used it to breed such a deep dependency that even now he wants to visit him, in his heart of hearts dreams of running away with him to Europe and getting_ married?

 _No one who hasn't met and talked with Hannibal understands, could possibly understand. He hates the comparison but it's so apt: it's like the people who say they can_ feel _their personal relationships with Jesus, that no one without one can know what it feels like to be a vessel of our Lord and Savior. Really knowing him is a foreign word with no English equivalent. Hannibal just sees things differently and once you see it the way he does there's no way to turn it off again so you can have some peace._ To extend the metaphor, _he thinks, mocking himself,_ everyone else sees Hannibal as the Devil, but to me he's Christ himself. Pathetic.

_Later, after the start of the Tooth Fairy investigation, the night he makes the decision to see Hannibal is spent nearly quivering with the intensity of his emotion, nauseous with fear and heartache and doubt, and Molly saying things to him on the phone from Sugarloaf Key that he can't process. He's on the verge of jumping out of his skin—he makes some excuse, he doesn't know what, and turns out the light to lay in the dark, eyes open._

_Half an hour later he turns the bedside lamp back on and starts drinking._

_Good and loaded, intensely drunk, he looks up from the infomercials he's pointed at to see Hannibal in the other chair in front of the TV, just watching him with his narrow maroon eyes, certainly not at all real._

_"No," Will says simply. Nothing happens. "No. You can't be here."_

_"I am not here. We are both_ there. _My palace. Although you may not be here or there."_

_Will sets down his heavy lids and opens them again. "Why is this happening."_

_"I heard your voice behind an unfamiliar door. You were talking in your sleep, sitting up in that chair. Passed out drunk, it looks like." He glances around. "The FBI allots more appropriate funds to room and board now, I see. That first day at your motel on the Hobbs investigation..." He frowns as if it's too unpleasant to even put the shabbiness of the room into words._

_Will is almost too drunk to keep his eyes open, and he won't remember this tomorrow, but there are a lot of things he doesn't remember. Instead he stands unsteadily, walks across the carpet to take Hannibal's shoulders in his hands. Hannibal looks up into his face, their noses nearly touching. Will can see every tint of red in his eyes._

_He takes one too few steps towards the bed and trips into it rather than really laying down, squirms to lay on his side while also pulling the covers up, then pats the bed beside him, looking deadly serious like only a drunk can. Internally Hannibal smiles. Externally, he follows Will's emotional cues. He takes off his jacket and hangs it up, takes off his shoes and gets into bed beside him, close, hand cupped around his face._

Absence does as advertised, _he thinks, not feeling any particular way about it. His emotions are mostly physical in manifestation, headaches when others might be anxious, restlessness when angry. Being in love with Will he experiences almost like a chronic disease. His chest aches when he thinks of him, he upsets his stomach, he keeps him up at night. He wonders if those who carry their feelings in their heads suffer any less in love._

_"My darling," he says to Will softly, feeling very unnatural but wanting to say something to him. "Will..."_

_Will grabs him around the neck suddenly and presses his face into Hannibal's shoulder. He's crying. Hannibal squeezes him tight, completely bewildered and having no idea what to do._

_"I miss you," Will sobs into his collar bone. His arms around Hannibal's neck tremble and there is an odd twisting sensation in Hannibal's chest. That one he doesn't like very much. "I miss you, I miss you so much..." Will trails off into tearful gasps, the weak hopeless sobs of the pathetically drunk. "I wish you were here, I wish you were real."_

_Hannibal doesn't bother explaining again. He holds Will close as he cries and lets his fingers fall through his curls, over and over, wishing that whatever strange phenomenon had allowed Will to somehow unintentionally enter the memory palace could be persuaded to let him smell Will. He sets his face against his hair and breathes deeply, but he can't smell Will. He's very bothered by it._

_Will is clearly on his way to passing back out. He breathes smooth and quiet against Hannibal's wet shirt, hardly trembling at all now, only at intervals. Hannibal turns out the only light he can reach without unduly disturbing Will, but he rouses slightly anyway._

_He doesn't appear to wake up, just mutters into Hannibal's chest, "Please come home."_

_In his cell Hannibal opens his eyes to gaze up at the moon through the skylight._

 

Hannibal is asleep beside the dying fire when Will gets back, but stirs at his approach. He holds up one side of the blanket. Will strips to his boxers and undershirt and climbs in.

They aren't done, but compartmentalization is a skill that makes being with Hannibal possible. It would be no good to try and straighten things out now. Will is tired and little drunk and he wants to sleep and hold Hannibal and remember who he is and what he's doing.

The stars dust a dim glow down from heavens, and by it Will can see that Hannibal's eyes are open, glinting like a wild animal's in the dark.

Will strokes his face, looking into them, and kisses him lightly, and they move naturally into a position where they can have their arms around each other. Hannibal takes it deeper, slipping his tongue into Will's mouth, sucking gently at his bottom lip. They spend a long time just kissing very sleepily, both thinking.

Their bodies press together, their legs entwined, and Will begins to grind his hips into Hannibal's in slow circles, feeling Hannibal getting hard for him making him hard. Hannibal slips a hand below his undershirt and Will feels the pad of his thumb brushing light circles over his nipple.

Muscles tighten low along his spine and Will hums _"mmmm"_ against Hannibal's mouth, pressing himself closer into the heat of his body. Hannibal's erection is jutting hard into him now and Will shifts his hips in and back to rub his own alongside it.

Things get a little wilder. Will's breathing is short and Hannibal is pinching his nipple, dragging his teeth lightly down Will's bottom lip, grinding a little harder.

 _Okay, you win._ He's about to pull Hannibal on top of him when Hannibal dips his hand below the waistband of his boxers, trails his fingertips up and down the length of Will's cock, wraps his fingers around it firmly and squeezes. Hannibal kisses him still, jerking his cock under the covers. Then he goes down.

Will lets out his breath and holds the next one, blows it out with a little whimper and finds himself holding the next one in too. Hannibal's mouth is sweet and hot and wet and he sucks Will in to the base of his cock on the first drop of his head, opening his throat effortlessly for him. The _sound_ —sometimes the sound gets him as much as the feeling. But what he really wants is to see; the sight of Will's refined, elegant man, his man, losing himself in sucking his cock turns him on in a way nothing else does.

And Hannibal does lose himself in it—Will tries not to jump to the obvious conclusion about why, for the sake of his peace of mind, but it's difficult when Hannibal has spent the last year waking him up in the morning or ambushing him all over the house with long, luxurious blowjobs that go on until Will practically begs for mercy. Whatever his...attraction to this particular act is, Will's not complaining, but he's not letting his guard down either. Hannibal Lecter's mouth is a deadly weapon no matter what else he might be doing with it.

_All firearms are at all times loaded._

Just then Hannibal's teeth graze him and he breaks out in goosebumps, but the accompanying shiver is one of pleasure. This is not a foreplay blowjob: this is a main-attraction blowjob, Hannibal's time-honored equivalent of makeup sex. It's not quite the same, because he's not sorry and Will knows he has every intention to keep getting his kicks out of Will's suffering, but it does help make the discomfort worthwhile. Hannibal is generous with redistributing his kicks.

A lovely aching itching kind of throb is starting in him, and Hannibal's mouth is so _good..._ Will had never understood people who do dangerous things like asphyxiation to get off before the first time Hannibal blew him. But every time they fuck it's all he can think about: the risk, the fact that he's making himself very vulnerable to a man who has shown every indication of wanting to kill him, the recklessness and stupidity of letting Hannibal put his lips and tongue and teeth on his cock, his bare neck, sometimes even bite down on his throat.

"Hannibal," he whispers urgently, "that's it, like that, ahh, _ahhh..."_ His back arches as Hannibal redoubles his efforts, sucking his mouth in tight around him. Will tries to brace against the feeling, gripping handfuls of his hair, it gets harder and tighter in him and he gasps as it breaks, moaning Hannibal's name, coming down his throat.

Hannibal comes up licking his lips and grinning. Will takes one look at his face and starts laughing.

"Have you ever been told you have an odd sense of humor, Will?"

"It's just your face..." Will chokes. "That Cheshire Cat grin."

"I'm glad I could entertain you."

Will puts his back against him and beds down, looking out into the dark. He feels Hannibal lay his face again his neck and take a deep inhale, and Will smiles, comforted.

Tomorrow they need to kill again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess what time it issssss it's retrospective angst time!!! Omg I love it, I wrote most of the part about Will's drinking problem a while ago and decided it was too sad haha. But here it's fine because there's risky blowjobs to soften the blow.
> 
> Please comment and let me know what you think, comments really motivate me argh!! stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com


	7. 6 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal stretches out of Will's grasp and moves to a spot on the other side of the dead fire. He crosses his legs and stares into the little sliver of sun. He addresses it: "Mischa."
> 
> Before Will, Hannibal talked to Mischa fairly frequently, and even though he now has a living person keeping company with him behind the veil, he still does it on occasion. He does not think she can hear him. He does not think she's anywhere or anything now. He is glad for that.
> 
> But he wants to share things with her sometimes, things that he imagines she would want to hear about if she could.

> _And the nightmare rides on_  
>  _And the nightmares rides on_  
>  _With a December black psalm_  
>  _And the nightmare rides on_
> 
> _What I feel is lost here_  
>  _The wind blows and I know_
> 
> _All you have to do_  
>  _Is run away and steal yourself from me_  
>  _Become a mystery to gaze into_  
>  _You're so cruel in all you do_  
>  _But still I believe, I believe you_
> 
> _So may you come with your own knives_  
>  _You'll never take me alive_  
>  _With all the force of what is true_  
>  _Is there nothing I can do?_
> 
> _—The Smashing Pumpkins, "Behold! the Night Mare"_

 

Hannibal wakes up instantly when the first beam of orange sunrise touches his face. Will, dear Will, is beside him on the blanket over the cold sand, softly snoring, peaceful in sleep right now as he occasionally gets to be. Hannibal's shadow cuts a black stripe through the orange light on his face.

Hannibal stretches out of Will's grasp and moves to a spot on the other side of the dead fire. He crosses his legs and stares into the little sliver of sun. He addresses it: "Mischa."

Before Will, Hannibal talked to Mischa fairly frequently, and even though he now has a living person keeping company with him behind the veil, he still does it on occasion. He does not think she can hear him. He does not think she's anywhere or anything now. He is glad for that.

But he wants to share things with her sometimes, things that he imagines she would want to hear about if she could.

"Mischa, my sister, good morning," he says in a low voice, as if he is dictating a letter. "I am well, as is Will. Mischa, I think of your little hands every day." He breaks off.

Her hands are the most pleasant visual impression he still has of her, her fat splayed fingers, patting at the bubbles, pancaking with a slap against the surface of the bathwater, her shrieks of baby laughter when he blew her bubbles with the bracelet.

Around his neck hangs, always, Mischa's tiny silver baby bracelet. If it were large enough, he would wear it. He touches it with the tip of one finger.

It is difficult to imagine what Mischa might be like as a woman. Were she living now, he, the Hannibal Lecter who occupies the body sitting in this desert, would not be. He supposes the boy who died in the snow in Lithuania, the boy with the chain embedded in the flesh of his neck, would be here in his place. That long-departed child, the freshly-made Count Hannibal Lecter the VIII, last of his line, endured the pain of the frozen metal's removal, but Hannibal carries its scar, yoke-like, faint now at fifty, possibly unnoticed even by Will.

But even that is unlikely, that the boy he had once been would have ended up here. Mischa's death so profoundly affected the course of his life and very soul that trying to imagine his path in a world where she lived is an exercise in fantasy.

He has read in the literature that occasionally, in those with dissociative identity disorder—a disease caused by exactly the type of horrific childhood event he experienced—the alters believe they inherited the body they occupy from the person who was originally born in it, whom they consider to be dead, in the same any other alter can be "born" and "die." It is very close to the mark for him. His mind is fragmented, and although he has it in a secure hold and has never found it to disobey him or do things he didn't order, it was undeniably permanently damaged by the hunting lodge. By what happened.

"Mischa," he says again. He repeats her name many times when he speaks to her. It's beautiful, and he wants it to stay alive, and he is the only person on earth who thinks of her now, the only one left to honor it. "I believe he would make you laugh too."

He wants it to be possible that Will could talk to Mischa too, could meet her. When he imagines it, she is as old as she was when he last saw her, and she feels more like their child than the sister who would be not much younger than he. Sometimes he sees Will cradling her in his arms as a baby, and that inspires one of the oddest physically-manifested feelings he's run into yet.

Hannibal does not worry what Mischa would think of him now, the thing her brother has become since she passed into blessed nothingness. She is and will always be a baby; she would love him the way she had in life. Mischa loved him, she loved him. He can still feel it, and he knows it will never leave. Comparison to Mischa is the only thing that finally solved the mystery of what to call the feeling Will causes in him.

Sometimes when he tries to picture her living he sees Abigail Hobbs instead. The resemblance is not good: Mischa would have lighter hair, curls, the characteristic burgundy Lecter eyes, his own high cheekbones and haughty lips. Abigail had been a beautiful girl, but she did not look like nobility, the way the Lady Mischa Lecter would have looked grown, the regal carriage that would have been bestowed her by her lofty blood. She would have been as lovely as their mother.

The next scene of this imagining is always an overhead view of a child's old-fashioned copper tub, Abigail stuffed into it, her lifeless body broken and twisted to fit the small space. He sees himself burying it in the woods beyond the lodge, not as a sharp-faced eighteen-year-old thrilling in his Becoming but a man, with five decades of life in him, with Will standing beside him, head bowed. The atmosphere of this vision is heavy, the obscure and cloying dread of a foreboding and confusing dream.

Yes, he buried Abigail, in deed if not in fact. That is done with. Animals have no use for the past or future, and neither does Hannibal Lecter. But Will's grief for Abigail had shocked him, not in being unexpected, but because he had for the first time regretted causing it.

He had been looking forward to sipping at it, cherishing the way he was locking Will in closer and closer to him, removing his other options, bonding them together with one more shared trauma. Instead he felt...that in retrospect, the decision had not been wise. Guilt, shame, and regret are beyond him; he can only say he now believes he should not have done it.

A misstep, that's all. He supposes even he himself is owed his share of them.

He does not miss Abigail, not the way he knows Will must. There is no need to miss her. She is as alive in the memory palace as she ever was on on this Earth, should he ever want to visit her. There Mischa is too.

In some rooms Mischa is a skeleton in a copper bathtub with a handful of flowers and jewelry dropped in. In some rooms Abigail is bleeding out on another kitchen floor. But in others he and Abigail can enjoy the quiet domestic pleasure of chosen family as they did during the months he kept her his personal secret.

Regardless, he will never teach her to play the harpsichord there. To hear it in the hallways of the palace would disturb him somehow.

Mischa is with him always; she cannot be taken away again. Abigail is safe now too. Someday, if it becomes necessary, he will make sure Will cannot be taken either.

Never again will he rot in a jail cell facing the possibility of living the rest of his life without Will. Will goes where he goes now. No matter what.

 

The man they pick is perfect in that they both know when they see him that he's the one. Will can see Hannibal mentally evaluating, estimating the depth of fat probably just as accurately as Mason's father's little knife trick. Physically his eyes don't change, of course, but the shift behind them is as obvious to Will as a cat's pupils narrowing to slits when it spies a bird.

It starts something in him. Wakes it up. He feels it click into place as the man becomes nothing to him but an opportunity, a prey animal. He thinks of sunlight glowing red in the fine tissue of a rabbit's ears.

They follow him casually through the streets in the car—it's Saturday and he does several small errands before turning around, presumably homeward. He walks, so he must live nearby, in town or on the outskirts.

The house he comes to has no close neighbors. Perfect. Will parks the car on a side street and they stroll unhurriedly around the corner to the sidewalk that runs in front of his house, stopping beside a little grouping of trees and brush one lot to the right.

Loitering in front of the bus schedule, pretending to read it, they hold a murmured conversation on their impressions of the house, the car in the driveway, the backyard they saw from the road behind the house, whether the man lives alone. They case the joint as thoroughly as they can without actually going anywhere near it and make the decision to come back when darkness falls.

Will sips at his scalding coffee in the sticky booth of the diner as Hannibal gazes out the window, lost in thought to others, to Will making instant penetrating assessments of the passers-by. He's in his element—the gap between the decision and carrying it out is tense, tension in the muscles that Will carries self-consciously but sees in Hannibal's relaxed frame as the coiling of a panther about to spring. It takes his breath away. The awe and majesty of nature's deadliest killing machines is Hannibal's when he scents death.

"Dr. Lecter," Will says under his breath. Hannibal looks up at him but Will continues to doodle on his napkin as if he hadn't said anything. "I want to fuck you senseless right now," he mutters into his burnt coffee, barely audible. He knows how sharp Hannibal's ears are.

The waitress returns before he can reply.

 

Alice makes Drs. Bloom and Chilton lunch and they continue to talk things over. Alana changes her mind and requests a drink. Might as well get down to it.

She is being forced to admit her precious year of normal life is over. For the first time today she wonders how much of this she should tell Margot. She is uneasy about keeping it a complete secret from her wife, if she even could.

"Is there any point in 'catching up'?" Chilton asks dully, picking at his chicken salad sandwich with a fork.

"There isn't much to say. I married Margot. We had a baby. I don't know if you knew about that."

"Yes, I was aware." That's all.

"You?"

Chilton gives Alana the dirtiest look she's ever seen. "Me? Oh, I am having a lovely time, Dr. Bloom. I have all the popular regard I could ever wish for now. I can hardly leave the house these days for all the gawking fans."

His insistence on repeatedly bringing up his disfigurement makes Alana uncomfortable, but she has no right to be. This is his reality now. She supposes she probably wouldn't be unduly thrilled about it either. She lets his comment lie.

"How is writing?"

"Fine," Chilton says with disinterest. "What are we going to do, exactly?"

Alana had been hoping he had something to start on. "Well...I had been thinking we could try something like what we did with the Dragon. Mock them in the press, use your idea that Hannibal is just stringing Will along."

"Are you _insane?"_

"Without your name!" Alana adds hastily, realizing that he may not be too eager to repeat the results of the last draft of this strategy. Chilton stares at her, eyes nearly bulging.

 _"Absolutely not,"_ he says. "I should kick you out of here right now for even making the suggestion."

"I guess I would deserve it," Alana acknowledges, taking her glass of white wine from Alice. They sit in more gloomy silence, which is not in short supply around Chilton's otherwise lovely screened-in back porch this afternoon.

Alana is not sure working with Chilton for this is the right idea, but she doesn't know where else to turn. She can't go to Jack, Mason is dead, Will has abandoned ship, and sometimes it feels like it's just her and Hannibal now, when she sees his face in the newspaper and on Tattle Crime. She feels very alone, and like there's a spotlight on her that only she and Hannibal can see.

"Well, then," she says eventually, "do you have anything?"

Chilton drinks his neat scotch and appears to consider.

Although she hadn't answered the question when he asked earlier, Alana actually is rather shocked to see Chilton drinking like this before noon. Even with her here, he's been hitting the scotch pretty hard, but he apparently handles brown liquor better than Will Graham used to and she can't tell if he's drunk from watching him.

"I do not think whatever we do, if anything, should be quite so public as that," he says. "The more players that become involved, the more out of our control things will be, and going public creates a player in each person who reads it."

This is smart, and Alana begins to dread the possibility that she may gain some respect for Frederick Chilton because of this thing. "So private? In what way? Contacting them directly?"

"Oh, not quite directly. Through Ms. Lounds. Many people do it, as a matter of fact."

He uses his cane to support his body weight and lurches to a small nearby table, throwing a copy of Tattle Crime nearly straight into her face.

"Sorry," he says, not sarcastically but not very sincerely either, hobbling back to his seat. Alana takes a deep breath and looks at it.

Indeed, there is a two-page spread dedicated to Will's and, by proxy, Hannibal's (he does not appear to have ever taken to texting very well) answers to various idiotic questions from horny, try-hard teenagers. Suddenly she puts the magazine down and closes her eyes.

Reading Will's dry remarks, hearing his soft sardonic voice clearly, is making her tear up, and she does not want to cry in front of Chilton. She really does miss Will, and his stupid jokes, and his self-deprecating comments, and being his friend.

She wants to get the man who killed him and make him pay.

 

Will means what he said, and a few minutes after they lay out the tip but before they've left he sends Hannibal a text from the restroom that reads simply "bathroom."

Hannibal waits for the teenage waitress to return to ensure she gets her tip safely and thanks her profusely for the service, embarrassing her. He sees that she's making little unconscious fanning motions at her face with one hand and realizes that she may be recognizing him and be keeping quiet about it. A fan. As his thank-yous he doubles her tip and smiles at her, and she goes so red that she only says again "thanks" and speed-walks to the kitchen.

 _I may actually enjoy being a public figure again,_ he thinks, opening the door to the bathroom, although he will never admit it to Will. He loves anything that increases his personal influence over the general population. Also, as Will had rightly said, he is very vain.

Will is waiting for him in the otherwise-empty men's restroom looking as nervous as a colt. Hannibal finds it endearing. He doesn't say anything, just steers him into the disabled stall and locks the door.

"Will," he says once inside, kissing him and feeling the pulse tapping quick in his neck, "I do not intend to block the main door into this restroom. If it draws attention and we're discovered, there will be too many repercussions."

He cups Will's erection through his jeans and whispers in his ear: "So I will ask you...to be very quiet."

Will moans, then realizes he's just broken the rule. Hannibal squeezes him a little hard.

"Shhh," he says, an awful smirk on his face. Will sees immediately that something has made Hannibal happy, which is the worst possible news he can get _after_ asking him to fuck. It means things are about to get maybe a little too interesting.

First Hannibal backs him up until he's forced to sit down on the toilet seat, then uses the hair at the side of his head to tilt Will's face up, a little painfully.

"Well, go ahead. You said you wanted to fuck me senseless." Hannibal stares at him steadily, expressionless.

Will keeps his gaze on Hannibal's (he doesn't have much choice) and blindly fumbles for his zipper, clumsy with anticipation.

Hannibal breathes heavy through his nose, leaning his free arm horizontally against one wall of the stall, as Will handles his stiff cock, stroking it, sucking the head while he builds up enough spit to go further. Hannibal is forcing his neck back at a slightly awkward angle for a blowjob, which is making that task difficult.

Hannibal watches Will under his lids, making sure to put the majority of his mind to work obeying his own rule. He doesn't want to let himself spend too much time in this stage. They have other things to get to, and he also doesn't actually want to be caught like this, if he can at all help it.

But he has to indulge a little, in Will's flushed cheeks, in the noises he's trying not to make, the sloppy mess Hannibal is creating by intermittently jerking Will's head to the side without warning so that Will's spit is wiped across his face by the head of Hannibal's cock. And his favorite thing...the hidden information he gets from Will's smell.

There's still hatred, real hatred, shrunken and very deep now but flaring up enough to scent very faintly when Hannibal sexually humiliates and uses him; resigned, perhaps even pleasurable, shame, a complex smell Hannibal loves more than almost any other, at least coming from Will when caused by himself; arousal, of course. Hannibal's eyes linger on the bulge in the lap of Will's faded jeans.

Just then they both hear the rising squawk of the hinges on the men's room door. Will freezes and nearly chokes; Hannibal remains absolutely calm. He had expected this to happen at least once. He releases Will's hair and gestures for him to stand. Will looks at him like he may be off his rocker but Hannibal merely raises his eyebrows and makes another infuriating _up_ hand motion.

The person unzips and begins relieving himself loudly into a urinal, apparently not aware of them as yet. The handicapped stall is at the end of the row, a few dozen feet away, and from where he had entered the man will not have been able to see the two sets of shoes.

Under the cover of the sounds the man is making, Will quickly stands, but before he can do anything else Hannibal turns him bodily to the tile wall and flattens him there. He reaches in front of him and undoes Will's fly, pulling his jeans down only far enough to expose his ass.

He can tell Will is silently panicking but he shoves a finger into him anyway and unzips just as the man finishes his very long piss. For a moment everything is silent, and they wait to see if the man caught the noise. Apparently not; footsteps to the sinks and the water runs.

Hannibal grinds his finger roughly into Will as the man washes his hands, daring him to cry out, and when he doesn't Hannibal manhandles him into position and thrusts into him bare, not even allowing him spit. He's not worried; he knows it can be done. He's done it himself. And besides, no matter how rough he gets, Hannibal is never being imprecise: his visual memory of the human anatomy is exact enough to let him nearly see through skin, if he needs to; his reflexes close to inhuman.

Now he forces himself deep into Will, who is turning crimson from horror and the effort of keeping quiet. His breath is just barely too loud despite his best efforts, and when the water goes off he may be loud enough to be heard.

Hannibal solves it by clasping a strong hand over Will's mouth and nose—in response he arches his hips into Hannibal with the quietest possible hum of intense pleasure. If there's a wrong note in anything his instincts tell him will drive Will crazy, he hasn't hit it yet, and he hopes he won't.

He presses Will forward into the wall and starts fucking him quick, deep, as far as he can, short hard thrusts, and the water stops. Hannibal stops.

Once again silence as if the man is just standing there, possibly listening. Will can barely breath with Hannibal clamping his mouth shut. Momentarily he leaves, and the hinges creak again.

"He may be suspicious," Hannibal says quietly. "So this will be quick."

He grabs Will by the hair again to force his face against the cold tiles and gets back to work. Will takes full advantage of the partial reprieve by whimpering and panting as quietly as he can, sometimes in pain.

The next time he winces Hannibal whispers, "You're doing so _well,_ Will..." in such an affecting mix of real pride and sadistic gloating that Will comes suddenly, biting his lip to hold it in, hands white-knuckled and flat against the wall. Hannibal's rides the tail end of Will's as he fucks him into the wall in short rough shoves, pressed against his back, breaking his own rule in the end by groaning "Will..." loud enough that Freddie Lounds definitely hears it as she walks into the men's restroom.

"Knock knock, boys," Freddie Lounds calls down to the handicapped stall. "Fun's over, we have things to discuss."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a pretty Hannibal-heavy chapter & I don't care because I love writing Hannibal's inner monologue!!! So there. Plus I am a strong advocate of MORE HANNIBAL RISING whenever possible.
> 
> <3 stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com
> 
> p.s. Badlands playlist! https://open.spotify.com/user/1226331128/playlist/0y4bnqzpez8pQaQKvfpQ4D


	8. 7 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dr. Lecter takes the stand. The emotional palette of the room darkens drastically.
> 
> In that warm melodic voice and rich accent, Dr. Lecter confesses, in copious detail, to everything.
> 
> When he is asked to confirm, for the record, that he frequently served tissues and organs from his victims to unknowing dinner guests, the handsome doctor smiles. A real smile, that reaches the laugh lines around his eyes and displays his pointed white eyeteeth.
> 
> Several of the jurors are compelled to leave the room and a recess has to be called. Freddie stays put. Crime journalism requires a strong stomach.
> 
> Hannibal catches her eye and winks.
> 
> She can't stop herself from winking back, straight-faced, and she sees Hannibal chuckle. Bastard.
> 
> CHAPTER-SPECIFIC TWs: panic attacks, dissociation, maybe psychiatric abuse, IV drugs

> _—terrors, and it's like, it feels like, as if somebody were gripping my—I have these terrors—and it's like, it feels like as if somebody was gripping my throat—they're not like tremors, they're worse, they're these terrors, and it's like, it feels like, as if somebody was gripping my throat and squeezing, and—it's like as if somebody was gripping my throat—_
> 
> _So say now suffer all the children and walk away a savior_  
>  _Or a madman and polluted by gutter institutions_  
>  _Don't you breathe for me_  
>  _Undeserving of your sympathy_  
>  _Cuz there ain't no way that I'm sorry for what I done_
> 
> _And through it all, how could you cry for me?_  
>  _Cuz I don't feel bad about it_  
>  _So shut your eyes, kiss me goodbye_  
>  _And sleep, just sleep_  
>  _The hardest part is letting go of your dreams_
> 
> _A drink, for the horror that I'm in_  
>  _For the good guys and the bad guys, for the monsters that I've been_  
>  _Three cheers for tyranny, unapologetic apathy_  
>  _Cuz there ain't no way that I'm coming back again_
> 
> _And through it all, how could you cry for me?_  
>  _Cuz I don't feel bad about it_  
>  _So shut your eyes, kiss me goodbye_  
>  _And sleep, just sleep_  
>  _The hardest parts are the awful things that I've seen_
> 
> _—My Chemical Romance, "Sleep"_

 

_Will gets the bull, I get the horns. Will gets the shout and I get the echo. Hannibal gets to win and I get to lose. Over and over._

Alana's thoughts bother her: one track, one song, semi-nonsensical variations on an obsession. Maybe this is what Will felt when Hannibal started to worm into his head. Pounding, pounding need until he gave in and fell.

She doesn't like it. It's a dirty high, this happy anticipation of death. Of murder. It twists her honest relief at keeping her family safe into a lilting tune of joyous filthy revenge. It feels familiar, like a flare-up of a chronic condition.

This sickly-sweet feeling is a disease Hannibal spreads. He's patient zero of the epidemic, poisoning the water like a dead body upriver. A lust for death. A feeling of unnatural clarity.

It's dangerous to feel like the best version of yourself. That's how she had known coke was dangerous right away, and never tried it a second time—she felt perfect, all-powerful, and that was too good a lie to work on her.

She wonders if Chilton feels it too.

She's still in his home, waiting to hear back from Freddie Lounds, as if by staying here she can confine this business to one place. She plans to get home around the time she usually does. Secrecy is dirty too. The god Will and Hannibal worship is seducing her one sin at a time.

Chilton is clearly sick of her presence, but doesn't seem to have the guts to throw her out. He sits in the wheelchair he occasionally uses, incongruously puffing at a pipe and staring into space with a crinkle in his brow like he's deep in thought.

"Cancer is no longer one of the things I fear," he says when he sees her looking.

Alana drains her glass again. She's been drinking all day and she doesn't like that either. But regardless of anything Mason Verger may have conjectured, she's no quitter. She's committed to the drunk now.

"You're not a bad guy, you know," she says to Chilton, apropos of nothing. He rolls his eyes, as she might have expected.

"Thank you so much for that faint praise, Dr. Bloom." He scratches the place where most people have noses, sighing, but he doesn't sound entirely displeased.

Alana half-smiles. "You're helping me save my family."

"What do you mean?"

She realizes she didn't actually explain that part. She does so now. Chilton grimaces the whole time.

"I might like to see him, you know. Morgan. If you would ever..." He becomes too self-aware to finish.

For the first time Alana thinks about the fact that Dr. Chilton is not married, does not seem to have much of a family. And how isolated he must be now. She thinks about her cruel words to him while he lay in the oxygen chamber, how heartlessly she had gloated over his obvious insecurities. Then she remembers his book and reels it in a little. But she does feel very sorry for him.

"Sure," she says. "Maybe...Margot and I can make dinner."

"Never mind," he says with disgust. "I do not need your wife's pity too."

"I don't pity you."

"Of course you do!" He laughs. "Do not lie to me. I am very well-acquainted with _pity_ by this stage in my life, Dr. Bloom. I almost fancy I could _smell_ it, like Dr. Lecter." He frowns deeply at the name.

"I don't pity you," Alana says softly. "I'm just _sorry,_ because you didn't deserve this."

Chilton doesn't know what to say. She looks away to give him privacy. Has anyone has told him that until now? That he didn't deserve the many terrible things that have happened to him? She wonders if it's true.

_Even if he deserved it, someone should tell him he didn't._

"I'm going home," she announces, to Chilton's obvious relief. "But I'll be back. Tomorrow."

"Of course," he says.

At that moment she gets a text from Freddie. She reads it, pressing her tongue to the back of her front teeth. Chilton waits impatiently.

"She says she'll know by noon."

 

At noon the next day, Will emerges first from the handicap stall, looking like the loser of a vicious bar fight.

"Lord have mercy," Freddie says. Her face twitches with suppressed glee. "My God, you kids play pretty rough." She gives in and starts laughing.

Will is not amused. Hannibal, smiling, clearly is. Without a word Will turns to the long mirror and begins washing his face over the nearest sink. The water runs pink with blood from his bitten lip.

"How might we assist you today, Ms. Lounds?" Hannibal asks, as if they are standing in his office rather than a dirty public restroom reeking of sex and piss.

She looks him up and down before she answers, just for an instant.

Hannibal looks different, younger in the face than when she had last seen him at the hospital, where he had peered out at her from the dark sunken eyes of a wild animal caged. He wears a light long-sleeve button-up in a solid pastel color and his jeans look tailored and neat. Most surprising, his hair is longer, tied back, and he has a day or two of matching blond-and-gray stubble. He looks good. Freddie tries not to notice.

"Let's not talk here," she says. To Will, still trying to get his hair back under control, she says, "Come on already, Will, you look beautiful."

Freddie heads into the diner, but Hannibal hangs back to stop Will on his way out and tuck his shirt back in properly, adjust his collar. Hannibal gives Will a sly private smile and says, "Beautiful."

Will smiles back despite himself.

 

In the parking lot they meet Freddie's cameraman, leaning against an unmarked white van.

After a brief and prickly discussion, Freddie agrees to leave him behind and go with Will and Hannibal to an undisclosed location to talk privately. The cameraman is vehemently against it, and he begins to get loud.

Hannibal speaks up, catching the camera man's eye. "Ms. Lounds will be back in thirty minutes exactly. If not, you may call the FBI tipline. I would not hold it against you."

That puts an end to it, and Freddie gets in the back of the junky old station wagon that is their current transportation, behind Will in the passenger seat. As Hannibal starts the car, Will slips a hand between his seat and the body of the car and makes contact with her knee for just a moment.

She appreciates the reassurance, but her guard stays up. Hannibal had searched her bag and given her little pistol to the cameraman for safekeeping.

Freddie uses the time to take stock. She's a careful and professional woman. She'll never know it, but she and Hannibal actually function in very similar ways.

Finding them was not hard, after all. She has ways. She has a knack for feeling out which sightings are legitimate, reading the trends in them. The pictures indicated unambiguously that they were in a desert area, and she thought they would stay in the less-populated states now that they knew how much easier it was out there.

Freddie Lounds also has a current private investigator's license, and she has connections in the federal task force on the Murder Husbands' killings (the feds don't call them that, though, just the press). When you can use all the means at your disposal, even the illicit ones, it's not hard to find someone you want to find.

The diner was small, and had large plate glass windows that allowed a good view from the front seat of the van in the parking lot. She had watched until she saw first Will, then Hannibal entering the restroom.

With her in the van was her largest, burliest cameraman/security guy, whose name was Aaron. They went into the diner together and she took a seat in a booth while Aaron scoped out the situation in the restroom. He texted her after he took his leak.

They were in there, he said, in a stall together, and the bathroom was otherwise vacant. He had heard only scuffling, no voices, and he guessed that the two men must be shooting junk. Freddie knew better.

Through texts she arranged for Aaron to let her into the restroom as he came out, so the door would creak only once. She stood just inside it, blocking the entrance with her body. Nearly a minute passed as she listened for something that would tell her Graham and Dr. Lecter were finished so she could more conveniently announce her presence.

_Wait a second, couldn't Dr. Lecter smell me when I came in? Why didn't he stop?_

Could he have been distracted enough by his dick to overlook Freddie's presence? It didn't sound like Hannibal to her. But why would he allow her to stand there unacknowledged if he knew she could hear him fucking Will Graham within an inch of his life?

As much as she wants to imagine it could be an invitation to something, her instincts tell her to look for double motives.

She knows Hannibal Lecter a little, how he works. He's not peerless, although he's the best Freddie has ever seen. He's primarily an exploiter of human frailty—the type of remorseless, sweet-talking person found at the center of suicide cults, able to size you up at a glance and tell you what you've been longing all your life to hear.

If Dr. Lecter intentionally allowed her to overhear, it was to his advantage to do so. What does he think he'll get out of it? What reaction does he expect her to have?

Trying to model Hannibal Lecter's convoluted thought processes is giving Freddie a headache.

None of the extremely _personal_ information she's collected (or been allowed to collect) about the sex lives of America's most wanted power couple has yet made it to the pages of _Tattle Crime._ If Hannibal is doing this purposely—she's beginning to wonder about the "accidental" phone call now too—he must have reason to assume she will keep what she overhears to herself. As she does, actually.

Number one, she certainly enjoys what she hears. But there's a business interest too. If the Murder Husbands are caught, she can put the anecdotes in her book and pray to God Graham and Lecter both get fried before they can find out.

Her odds are not bad—if the feds should get ahold of Dr. Lecter again, they won't just wag their finger and stick him back in his rubber room. Her guess is that when they find him, she can count on some overzealous avenging-angel prick putting Lecter down, like a mad dog, on sight. In cases where public outrage is so thick, it seems to happen even when orders are to bring the monster in alive.

The feds will want to avoid another trial, too, if they can. Lecter's trial four years ago had been a joke. The defense's insanity plea was the punchline. Dr. Lecter, unable to tell right from wrong? He could write you a scholarly dissertation on the subject from every angle. That much was obvious to the jury right away.

 

_In its opening statement, the defense paints a detailed (and rather flattering—difficult to avoid) portrait of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, M.D.: white, male, six feet tall, forty-six years old, never married; immigrated to Baltimore, Maryland, from Paris at age 18 to accept a residency at Johns Hopkins. A gifted surgeon before he turned to psychiatry. Naturalized US citizen for over twenty years; country of origin, Lithuania. No known living relatives._

_The doctor is the sole proprietor of an established local business; a sitting member of the board of directors for the Baltimore Philharmonic Orchestra; a published author many times over. He has never been in trouble with the law, his job history is steady. No traditional signs of antisocial behavior. No one deposed has a bad word to say._

_In short, Hannibal Lecter is a pillar of his community._

_The jury can see for themselves that Lecter is good-looking, clean cut, dignified. He speaks politely and soberly at all times, and in a very charming accent, too._

_Even if some found him a little cold, how could this man be a murderer? Why would he do it?_

It should be so easy to get him out of it, _Freddie thinks, watching Hannibal from the press section._ His IQ is unimaginable. He displays a full range of appropriate if blunted emotional responses; cognitively a perfect specimen; nothing showed up on any of the tests done during discovery, at least the ones His Majesty deigned to sit for.

 _To the jury the defense relates these things that Freddie already knows, having kept up with the case as it developed for_ Tattle Crime. _Defense rests. The jurors are intrigued, they wait to hear the catch._

_The catch is revealed when Dr. Lecter takes the stand. The emotional palette of the room darkens drastically._

_In that warm melodic voice and rich accent, Dr. Lecter confesses, in copious detail, to everything._

_When he is asked to confirm, for the record, that he frequently served tissues and organs from his victims to unknowing dinner guests, the handsome doctor smiles. A real smile, that reaches the laugh lines around his eyes and displays his pointed white eyeteeth._

_Several of the jurors are compelled to leave the room and a recess has to be called. Freddie stays put. Crime journalism requires a strong stomach._

_Hannibal catches her eye and winks._

_She can't stop herself from winking back, straight-faced, and she sees Hannibal chuckle._ Bastard.

_It reminds her to look around for Will. If he's here, it will be the first time she's seen him in months. He seems to have been lost in the shuffle since the Chesapeake Ripper voluntarily surrendered himself to the FBI outside his front door. She hasn't even heard how he's doing since the events at Muskrat Farm._

_Will is here, may have just now showed up. He is in the furthest row back, alone, failing in his attempt to be surreptitious as he takes a nip out of a flask._

_He could just as well be a homeless man who wandered in from the cold—he looks rough enough. When he sees her watching he reddens and turns away, swallowing nervously like a dog._

Jesus Christ, _Freddie thinks, openly staring in her amazement._ He looks like someone died. What the hell is going on here? What _was_ this? I knew Will Graham liked to bend the elbow a bit more than he should, but right now he's clearly dead drunk, in public, before noon.

_When she turns back around to face Dr. Lecter, he's gazing past her to the back of the room as if she doesn't exist._

Oh my God, _Freddie thinks. The pieces come together over the hushed chatter of the remaining jurors._ This is about Will. That's why Dr. Lecter turned himself in. They would have never caught him, but he'd confess to nailing Christ to the cross for Will. This is all for him.

And Will won't take it.

_She sits back on the bench to digest this bombshell._

_Freddie has written a_ lot _of copy on the topic of Will and Hannibal's open-secret love affair. Her readers love it: the casting of a FBI special investigator and his serial killer prey in a sexy, dramatic, and_ gay _will-they-or-won't-they soap opera. She had figured they were fucking—she's usually good at spotting these things—but this is...extreme emotions._

This isn't a jealous-lovers thing. These boys are in _love-_ love. Wow.

A lot of things make sense now. In a weird way.

 

In the present, Freddie checks the time when they finally park, deep in the desert out of sight of the road. _Ten minutes out, ten minutes to talk, ten minutes back,_ Freddie calculated. _Assuming I...make it back._

The ride had been quiet, and a little tense. There is a weird energy in the car that makes Freddie feel unpleasantly anticipatory. If she didn't know better, she'd say it was sexual tension. But it's almost more like the stormclouds of a fight, one that doesn't involve her.

"I've had word from a friend of yours," Freddie says, breaking the hard silence. "The esteemed Dr. Bloom. She wanted me to relay a message and I thought you might want it personally."

"How did you find us?" Will asks. Hannibal raises his hand slightly and Will scowls.

"What is it?" He leans around the headrest.

Freddie squirms internally but remains outwardly blasé. She does not think her outward appearance makes one atom of difference to Hannibal, but she still looks him in the eye steadily to show him she doesn't care.

"Alana wants you to know she remembers your promise."

"What promise?" Will asks immediately. Hannibal doesn't look at him.

"Is that all, Ms. Lounds?"

"That's all," she says, "but it's a threat. She came alone but kept saying 'we.' She may be forming a posse."

"A posse," Hannibal repeats, delighted with the word. Will is less enthusiastic.

"What is this promise, Hannibal?" he asks again, looking at him, not Freddie.

"Could you give us a moment, Ms. Lounds?"

"Of course." She gets out, shuts the door, and walks a few paces away into the desert.

"I made Alana a promise while in her care," Hannibal says evenly. "I told her that she, her wife, and her child were mine. I informed her that she lives or dies at my leisure."

Not surprising. Will looks at the flat horizon through the windshield. His heart is pounding uncomfortably. "And she's decided to be proactive about that, it sounds like."

"So it would seem."

"Do you intend to kill her?"

"I promised that I would kill her."

"That's not what I asked."

"Would you rather I did not?"

Will thinks, a panicky feeling starting to rise in him physically but not mentally yet. He has time to be honest.

"If you kill her, you do it alone," he says slowly. He hopes it's the right answer.

It's the only variable he can truly affect in the end. It is not possible to give Hannibal Lecter an order to do or not do any particular thing, not for anyone, not even Will. Hannibal does what he likes and absolutely nothing else.

But Will doesn't _want_ Alana to be dead, threat or no threat. Things are beginning to seem close and portentous, suddenly. He knows it's the panic spreading into his head from the rest of him, like venom circulating out from a snakebite.

Will opens his mouth to add to his statement but his vocal cords refuse to form the words. With a sudden stab of alarm, he realizes he's on the brink of dissociation. All at once it happens like a rollercoaster drop. Hannibal sees it.

"Will?"

Will stares at him; his eyes are stuck open, yet he can't focus them. Hannibal's face looks bizarre—like a word written too many times in a row—you know it's a word, you know what it means, but it just looks so odd and...wrong.

The high contrast of the sharp desert sunlight only enhances the uncanny effect. Everything Will sees from behind the window of his eyes is flat, fake, like a bad imitation of German Expressionism. _Painted shadows out of_ Nosferatu _. That isn't real._

_This can't be real. I can't be here right now._

Everything looks artificial. He feels like he's suddenly realized he's dreaming, or that he's been plucked from reality and set down in a play, or he's jumped several years ahead in time, or...

 _Not now, not with Freddie here,_ he thinks desperately, already too far away to stop it. Tears begin to drop down his cheeks. He barely notices when Hannibal gets out of the car and walks around to his door; he's trying to process a sound rising in the background.

Eventually he places it as uneven, raspy breathing, getting faster and shallower by the second.

_My breath. I'm hyperventilating. I'm having a panic attack. Fuck fuck..._

But everything is drifting away, the tightness in his chest receding from his consciousness as his body goes numb with a feeling unpleasantly like bleeding out, his thoughts jumbling together and running into each other.

 _Where...where...I'm not here...I'm scared I'm not here where am I I'm sorry let me go home I'm scared—_ shut up shut up shut up no stop it fuck— _who am I where am I who am I—_

"Your name is William Horace Graham," Hannibal tells Will quietly, as if he can hear his thoughts.

Will starts, and with an effort turns his face toward Hannibal's voice. He's upside-down. Will is dimly aware of having changed locations.

Hannibal's voice is measured, calm, deep. "I'm going to help you. Focus on my voice. You need to slow your breathing."

 _Me...I..._ Will wrestles himself for control, trying to will himself back into his body, cut through the confusion and gain control over his lungs again. _I can't...breathe..._

"You are safe."

_Jamais vu._

Now his addled brain is coughing up bits of lectures and half-remembered readings.

_The sensation of doing something, seeing something, being somewhere familiar but experiencing it as unfamiliar._

_The opposite of déjà vu._

_Already seen, never seen. Already seen, never seen. Already already already dead you're dead he was never seen again ripped to shreds ripped apart ripped open by the Chesapeake Ripper Jack—_

"This is real. You are real."

Images are drifting randomly into his mind, images of pulling the trigger and covered in blood _quite black in the moonlight_ and clutching his belly to keep his guts inside and bodies arranged like flowers and sickly pale fungi and something impossibly huge striding alongside his car on the dark road in the forest and some little creature yelps in pain and he's pulling the chimney down, smashing it apart with his hammer, sweating and covered in brick dust but _I have to do it I can't let it suffer it's in the chimney I can hear it I'm not fucking crazy they all think I'm goddamn crazy! If I hear something I hear it it's there it's there it's there it's real_ and his head is aching his head is pounding and it's _nothing just a little fever probably just the flu just leave me alone I'm_ fine—

"It is Tuesday, August 30th, 2016. Where are you, Will? Tell me."

"Home," Will mutters automatically, the sound of his own voice startling him out of his train of thought.

To his surprise his breathing actually has slowed, although bursts of hyperventilation will continue to break through. He finds he's lying curled on his side in the backseat of the shitty station wagon, hot dry wind blowing through, weak as a baby.

He sees what happened. Hannibal is pinching a cotton square into the crook of his elbow. He gave Will something, with a needle.

"Yes. Come back home, Will." Hannibal takes his chin to look into his eyes. "You're safe."

Forcing as deep a breath as he can manage, Will realizes that he's in pain. While he was away it seems that every muscle in his body decided to twist and clench so tightly that everything aches. Trying to unknot the cramps is only causing his muscles to jerk violently and making his whole body shudder.

He hugs himself shakily, feeling as though he's just awakened from a hellish nightmare. And it's not over yet. He doesn't know what Hannibal puts into him to bring him out of panic attacks—he _hopes_ it's a benzo of some kind—but it feels _good,_ and as the post-attack exhaustion begins to set in he slowly relaxes into the seat below him. Will lets go.

 

Freddie looks on as Hannibal helps Will into the back to lay down. Will's movements are stiff and jerky. She isn't sure what's going on, but he seems out of it, his eyes are unfocused.

Through the car window she can see Hannibal on the other side, crouching outside the open door, apparently speaking quietly to Will. As she watches he produces a vial of something and a slim syringe, which he loads with a tiny amount of clear liquid. She looks away when he reaches for Will's arm, counts to ten, looks back.

Freddie's mind is on the clock—this sidebar is going to push them over the allotted time, although it's only been 25 minutes so far since they drove away. She reaches for her phone. _I should let Aaron know before he hits the panic button like good old Will Graham._

But it's too late—Hannibal stands suddenly and looks off into the desert in the direction they came from; Freddie can't hear it yet, but it must be a car. _Fuck, that idiot—he didn't wait the full half hour. Goddammit, Aaron, you pussy._

Hannibal shuts Will's door and calls to her, "Come along, Ms. Lounds," as he climbs back into the driver's seat. She makes haste back to the car and turns quickly as she buckles the seat belt to look at Will, staring blankly at the roof, stretched out across the seats on his back.

Hannibal steps on it, straight off into the empty desert, humming to himself.

"Wait a minute, where are we going?"

"To find suitable lodgings for the night, in New Mexico. Possibly Utah."

"That's hours away," she points out, watching him.

"Then I must ask for your patience and cooperation."

 _Great. Great._ "Great," she says aloud. "You realize what this means. They'll say you've taken a hostage. That's an additional federal offense, hostage-taking, kidnapping, and across state lines."

"But this is perfect for you, is it not?  _Cinéma vérité._  This is as exclusive as it gets, Ms. Lounds." Dr. Lecter is inexplicably cheerful.

"What about _you?_ What about Will?"

He turns to her, raising his eyebrows. "I'm touched that you can find time to worry about that at a time like this. Aren't you the hostage of two murderers? It's a bit early to develop Stockholm Syndrome."

"Not if you've been trying to cultivate it ahead of time."

Hannibal smiles. It's the same real, honest smile that made half the jury suddenly excuse themselves.

"Reading ahead, are we? I must say, your guesses are usually quite close to the mark. Very impressive, much better than most. No, Ms. Lounds, this isn't about you. Not yet."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I finally broke my sex-scene-per-chapter streak, but I think I'll jam an Apocrypha chapter in there to make up for it haha. I need a break from this drama omg.
> 
> So timeline-wise, someday I'm going to have to go back and polish things up, because the timelines of the various things are sort of out of sync. Basically:
> 
> \- The Robinsons were killed on the evening of the 26th (of August). Will and Hannibal drive straight to the motel and sleep there.
> 
> \- On the morning of 27th Alana and Jack read the news, and the same morning Freddie publishes the candid picture and Will and Hannibal see it when they get up. Will calls Freddie that eveningish?
> 
> \- Alana calls the federal investigator the next morning, the 28th, the day the Hoopers are killed. Will and Hannibal take their own picture on the 28th. That night Freddie gets the "accidental"??? phone call.
> 
> \- The 29th Freddie is taken in for questioning and Alana drives to Chilton's instead of work. That night Will walks away into the desert.
> 
> \- All of 5 Badlands is still the 29th, Alana's parts in the morning and Will's at night (confusing!)
> 
> \- Alana and Chilton's lunch is still the same meeting on the 29th, but the morning Hannibal wakes up to talk to Mischa is the 30th I guess.
> 
> \- Alana is STILL at Chilton's on the 29th in this chapter and Will, Freddie, & Hannibal's stuff is still the 30th.
> 
> So that's very awkward but hopefully that makes sense! Please comment, check out the playlist (link in last chapter's note), and find me on Tumblr at stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com :3


	9. 8 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal's chair is empty. Will walks to the dark rectangle of the doorway and looks back at Freddie, still standing under the floodlight. He is letting her choose.
> 
> "He would let you in," Will says, his voice strange. "You could come with me now, if you wanted to."
> 
> "Would I be in danger?" she whispers.
> 
> "You'll always be in danger. You've been in danger since the day you met him. All of us are. All of you. You were in danger before you came to us, and you're in danger...right now."
> 
> With that, he steps into the room, the black inside seeming to swallow him. The door he leaves open for her.
> 
> TWs: psychiatric abuse, emotional abuse, mention of domestic abuse/rape, sexual choking (???), drugs

> _There's a word for it_  
>  _And words don't mean a thing_  
>  _There's a name for it_  
>  _And names make all the difference in the world_
> 
> _Some things can never be spoken_  
>  _Some things cannot be pronounced_  
>  _That word does not exist in any language_  
>  _It will never be uttered by a human mouth_  
>    
>  _Give me back my name_  
>  _Give me back my name_  
>  _Something has been changed in my life_  
>  _Something must be returned to us_
> 
> _—Talking Heads, "Give Me Back My Name"_

 

Freddie is getting sick of Dr. Lecter's inexplicable good mood. She climbs between the seats into the back and sits on the floor of the car by Will's head.

"Hey," she says quietly, trying to get his attention as gently as possible.

Will rolls his eyes to her, they flick around her face, they go back to the ceiling.

"What's wrong with him?" she asks Hannibal instead. She wonders if Will knows what's going on or can even hear her.

"He has experienced an episode. Our Mr. Graham has post-traumatic stress disorder with psychotic features. As I believe you know, Ms. Lounds."

Caught red-handed. "Well, is he okay? Does he need to be in a hospital?"

"Not at all. He will be with us shortly. He has business to attend to."

"You're the doctor," Freddie says doubtfully. Will looks bad. Short of drooling, he couldn't be more gone. His eyes track around as if he's watching something interesting play out on the ceiling.

_How much of this is whatever Dr. Lecter shot him up with?_

She doesn't dare to ask what it was. Not at this juncture, with no way to defend herself or anywhere to go if Dr. Lecter gets testy. But at the trial she had heard about Dr. Lecter's little bout of Munchhausen-by-proxy, using Will as a pincushion when convenient while deliberately holding back his knowledge of Will's life-threatening brain infection.

 

_It is one of the darkest days of the trial. The gore they expect. They did not know to prepare themselves for the depth of the pain inflicted by Lecter on his patients. None have come forward to testify against him except Will Graham, who has not yet taken the stand. He is scheduled to do so at noon._

_But the dozens of stories of manipulation and emotional abuse being calmly related by Dr. Lecter, particularly about Will, are heartbreaking. At one point the heavy door to the courtroom slams in the middle of an answer, and when all heads turn to the back, no one is there. It was Will leaving, although probably no one had realized he was here already, as he continues to sit in the last bench every day. Freddie saw him struggling not to cry out of the corner of her eye for the last two questions._

_Next they try to ask Dr. Lecter why he turned himself in and the trial becomes very tiring very quickly. Dr. Lecter refuses to answer that particular question in any form, and twice he turns the cross-examination to something unrelated and drones on about it until they try a different subject, one more interesting to Dr. Lecter than the sound of his own voice. However, it doesn't matter. Everyone in the courtroom now knows, thanks to this morning's_ Tattle Crime, _that on the night he surrendered, Lecter was at the home of one Will Graham, a former patient, and, some said, lover._

_After the first day of the trial, she went home and did some digging, and some wheedling, and some threatening, and some sexting, until she had the whole story. Yesterday morning, when Dr. Lecter saw that Will had to get drunk off his ass to come and look him in the eye, he crumbled. She had never, ever seen him look like that before. She knows._

_Graham, it comes out in court, had been one of four left for dead eight months ago by Dr. Lecter, an attempted mass murder inspired by the doctor's discovery of Graham's undercover role in an extremely misguided, extremely unauthorized FBI honeypot operation intended to catch Lecter in the act of killing. Graham was the honeypot. He had taken the job willingly, because he was already extremely intimate with Dr. Lecter, and because that state of affairs was beginning to raise questions about his loyalties._

_According to Freddie's sources in the Behavioral Science Unit, Jack Crawford—the Guru himself, not known for his sensitivity to problems at home, so to speak—agonized for months over asking Graham to help ensnare Lecter. The entire unit, her source said, knew the two were secretly lovers, and his friends feared for Graham's reportedly shaky mental health if he was forced to betray Lecter to the FBI._

_And that's exactly what she had written on_ Tattle Crime _that morning._

 

Eventually thinking of the trial begins to make Freddie uncomfortable about being friendly with Dr. Lecter, and she really enjoys her odds of surviving this if Dr. Lecter likes her, so she tries to think of something else to do.

Some of her endless road-movie confinement she passes playing the game that everybody who has a ghost of an opportunity to check out an older guy (or guys) does, calculating that Will, ten years older, is about 40, and Hannibal about 50. Hmm.

_Damn him. He's aged better than I have. If he isn't the Devil he's probably done business with the guy._

For a certain type of woman, evaluating men is a career skill. She's dealt with hard men, but men are often hideously soft instead, simpering, idiotic, manipulative, or lewd. The hard ones are, well, hard. The soft ones are easy by now, so easy. She can talk anything she wants to know out of a soft man given the time and maybe a bottle of liquor.

But Freddie likes the hard ones better.

Dr. Hannibal Lecter is a hard one, alright, one of the hardest she's ever tuned her antennae towards. He's the rarest and most dangerous kind, too, a hard man perfectly imitating a soft man. Dr. Lecter is, really and truly, an incredibly sweet man. A peach. She sees now that it makes perfect sense for a murderer to treat Will like a princess. He's good to people he likes.

And why not? Lecter genuinely likes Will, loves him, and so of course he would treat him his idea of "well." In _his_ mind, he probably treats all of his "friends" "well."

Although the ride is both long and stressful, it's not because of Hannibal. He seems to enjoy the change of company. In fact, he nearly talks her ear off, in a very polite and unstoppable way, about the history of journalism, the place of tabloids in it, yellow journalism in general, the valuable social role of muckrakers, Upton Sinclair, William Randolph Hearst, _Citizen Kane,_ and finally Orson Welles, whom he apparently finds so fascinating that he is able to lecture at length about him until Freddie actually falls asleep an hour before they reach the hotel that night.

Will was up and occasionally contributing to the conversation by the time they got to Mr. Welles. But for nearly a day before that, it was just her and Dr. Lecter. It was the most time she'd ever spent with him, by far the longest where they were "alone."

And it was nice.

 

Not once do they see their pursuers. They've gotten away.

Hannibal pays for two adjoining rooms in the moderately-sized hotel, in cash, and bids Freddie goodnight as he shuts the door. It is long after midnight. Now she's abruptly alone.

Freddie tries to mindlessly browse the internet on her phone, curled up in bed, but she can't get a signal. Briefly she is frustrated.

 _This might not be bad, you know,_ she tells herself. The pleasure of Hannibal's company earlier improved her overall outlook on being kidnapped.

Then the noises start. The headboard next door is repeatedly hitting the wall behind hers. Freddie groans and wraps the pillow over her ears, not dumb enough to bang on the wall and tell them to keep it down.

_Again? Really? Don't they ever talk about their day?_

Normally she wouldn't mind one bit, but _her_ day has been draining. She tosses the ineffective pillow away and heads into the bathroom, grabbing a plastic pop-up package of wet wipes, then slides open the glass door to the shared balcony, where maybe she won't be able to hear or can at least get high enough to not care.

The hard plastic wet-wipes case actually contains about an eighth of passable mids, a book of Zig Zags, a miniature travel grinder, and a lighter. Thankfully it had been in her purse when she went to talk with them, and though it occurs to her now that Hannibal might have been able to smell the weed, he didn't confiscate it like her pistol. On the balcony Freddie sits on the floor and dangles her legs between the wide bars. She carefully rolls a joint and lights up.

She exhales a thin stream of smoke in the direction of the tiny sliver of white moon in the sky. Without it the stars seem much brighter. The hotel backs on to the desert, but far out she can see the lights of cities. Smart; give the guests some privacy on their balconies.

Behind her the glass door slides open and Freddie jumps. Will does too, and before she can realize he's naked he's ducked back inside and pulled on some boxers.

"Sorry," he says. Freddie coughs and nods at him, _no big deal,_ then holds out the joint. Will chuckles.

"Don't mind if I do, actually," he says, sitting down cross-legged on the concrete despite the empty deck chairs. Freddie moves to mirror his position and Will notices instantly that Freddie is in her underwear too, under a long nightshirt. He does not stare, just accepts the joint and takes a long hit.

"This guy," Freddie says, apparently in reference to the size of his hit. She giggles in the uncharacteristic way she does when she's high. Several times when they've spoken on the phone Will could tell she was stoned.

Will holds his hit for a long time, wiggling his eyebrows at her, before he exhales.

"Oh," he says, "I'm _experienced_ , Ms. Lounds."  She laughs again. _Oh boy, where did that come from?_

"Please don't call me that, you sound like _him,"_ Freddie says, and now she definitely might possibly be flirting.

"Oh, God. Now I won't."

They pass the joint once or twice and Will worries about how he's obviously killed the conversation. _Oh yeah, that's why I never smoke anymore._

"So," Freddie says, spilling smoke from her mouth, "are we cool now? I mean," she rethinks it, "I'm sorry about the colostomy bag thing. And the naked picture. And making you look like a murderer. Although I guess you are now."

Will discovers he is too stoned to protest being called a murderer.

"Freddie Lounds, you are forgiven," he intones instead, having mostly forgotten what he's actually forgiving. His high set in while Freddie was speaking. "From this moment forward we have a sacred hostage-captor bond."

"You've mellowed out a bit," Freddie teases him. "What could have caused that change?"

Will, even more transparent than usual under the influence, smiles the way people do when they think of the person they love, when they're treasuring the little thing they have that's good. For a moment Will feels utterly, completely normal. "It's him."

"That good, huh?"

"He loves me," Will says simply, feeling almost shy. From his slight remove he notices that he didn't say _I love him,_ as if that part is obvious and unremarkable. _He loves me._

It's odd to have a conversation about Hannibal that's not about how to kill him or avoid being killed by him or keep other people from killing him. It's also just weird to talk to Freddie about Hannibal strictly in his capacity as Will's... _boyfriend,_ he guesses.

It feels strangely feminine, and strangely intimate. Will might just be high, but he thinks he likes it.

So he's more game than he might otherwise be when Freddie starts to say, "So on that subject," then collapses into giggles, "so what's that like?" She indicates the glass door to Will and Hannibal's room with a tilt of her head.

Will hesitates, smiling self-consciously, and Freddie cracks up again.

"It's like fucking a tiger," he manages finally. "Oh, my God."

"Mmm." Freddie puffs on the joint, smirking. "Looked like you'd been mauled, alright. In the diner."

Will feels himself turn entirely red, all at once, like Gene Wilder having hysterics in _The Producers._ Freddie chokes on her hit laughing.

"You were _bleeding,"_ she says.

"Yeah, yeah. I've already said too much."

"Hey, Will," Freddie says, suddenly stoner-sincere, "he...treats you alright, doesn't he? Like you wanted him to do that to you, in the bathroom? Because...you _were_ bleeding. You have a split lip."

"I did that," Will says, feeling odd about the question. "I bit my lip trying to be quiet."

"He was hurting you that bad?"

This is really becoming a conversation Will doesn't want to have, or even think about, at least not right now. It does honestly touch him that Freddie would ask, but his precious moment of normality has deflated.

"Look, Freddie..."

"Let's just talk about it sober sometime," Freddie says placidly. Her eyes are nearly closed. Will knows he'll forget the conversation entirely in the next minute, so he tries to think of something else to accelerate the process. He can't.

"That's not what he would do to me," Will says, instead of changing the subject. "If he wanted to hurt me, in a way I didn't like, he wouldn't do it...well, while we were fucking, I guess."

He realizes this is the very first time he's ever discussed his romantic (?) relationship with Hannibal with another person, at least since they've been actually...together. He feels shy again. He hates it. But maybe it starts that way.

Will has been in relationships before, of course. He was married, for two and a half years. But Hannibal makes him feel like a teenager. It's not the nearly ten-year age difference, although that sometimes makes him a little giddy in a different way. It's just that he honestly thinks that no one ever had the feelings he is currently having, in this exact combination, before, ever.

So he has never even thought about the fact that he hasn't talked to anyone about it until just now. He and Hannibal are a world unto themselves since the fall. Every time he thinks of it that way, as "the fall," he inevitably follows on to embarrassingly melodramatic metaphors, about _the_ Fall, as in of Man.

Everything just seems so earth-shaking, so all-important when Hannibal is with him, and the complicated metaphors needed to talk about it are half flourish, half necessity. Whatever there is between them is nearly post-romantic, postmodern, some new thing that could truly blur you, something that welds tighter than marriage or babies or even blood. Love stronger than blood.

He realizes Freddie may have asked him a question while he was staring into space.

"What?" he says.

"Why not?"

"Why not...?"

"Oh, nevermind." Freddie giggles again.

Will notices all at once how cute she is, with her ringlets and her huge sea green eyes. Very similar in color to his own, actually. And she's tiny, only about five-two barefoot; he and Hannibal are both nearly six feet tall.

For one second, just a second, he imagined how easy it would be to pick her up, to put her wherever you wanted in bed. Even a guy with Will's build could easily fuck her against a wall. If he wanted to.

"You're blushing, Will." He has been staring at her.

"Oh my God." Will laughs at himself, dying inside, and blushes more. Freddie finds herself having her own cuteness-related revelations and the first truly awkward silence ensues. Will is reminded of meeting a penpal for the first time.

They had known each other (and been on terms that were cordial at best) _before,_ but this is _after._ These are the latter days, the end times, fire and brimstone days. _No..._

Will shakes his head, as if his brain were an Etch-A-Sketch. It never works but it's helpful to do something physical sometimes, when the thing in his head starts sowing delusions.

 _The thing in his head_ —that's how he thinks of the combined effects of all the things wrong with him, having long ago given up the pointless exercise of trying to trace any particular effect back to any particular diagnosis. His mental illness, his _instability,_ the thing that made certain people afraid to be alone with him, even before. The panic attack was bad—he's getting antsy waiting for the other shoe to drop.

He just wants to relax and smoke and talk to a cute girl, not listen to the street corner preacher in his head yelling about saints and prophets and fate and the apocalypse. Perhaps that particular theme had been a final gift from the Dragon.

_Watch therefore, for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh._

The silence is growing longer and longer. Will has a terrible feeling that he's still blushing. Between mental tangents he keeps coming back to the image of fucking Freddie against a wall.

Freddie asks the question they're both thinking.

"So...do you and Hannibal everrrrrr..." Freddie trails off in a suggestive way. "Have _company?"_

"We _haven't,"_ Will says, in what he hopes is a subtle indication of open mindedness on the subject. He's not sure he's ready to go there, but it doesn't hurt to leave the door propped open.

He actually has no idea what Hannibal may or may not think about "having company," either. He knows, in the way he sometimes just knows things in his bones about Hannibal, that he's certainly done it before. Just not with Will.

And Will can say without a hint of a boast that he's not like the others to Hannibal. It's just a fact. Hannibal, a man arguably without a soul, had moved Heaven and Earth for him. They changed each other.

However...that does not necessarily preclude the possibility. Hannibal may actually love him more than anyone has ever loved another person, but his love isn't on the same scale as anyone else's. Hannibal's love, like his mind, is labyrinthine, and he would not be surprised to find that the idea of a third conflicted not at all with his set of rules.

As for Will...he was sexually jealous of Alana for touching Hannibal, and he's never asked about Bedelia, afraid to confirm those fears. But those things seem very far away and unimportant now in the full bloom of their Becoming.

On an impulse, a very non-Will Graham impulse, Will leans in and kisses Freddie. She kisses him back.

"Well, well," Hannibal says, sliding the door open and flicking on the exterior light. Will turns to look at him calmly; Freddie is startled out of her wits. Like Will, Hannibal is half naked, standing in the doorway in loose pajama pants that drape appealingly, in both their eyes, over one of his many good features.

"Ms. Lounds," he says courteously.

Freddie can't think of anything to say, so she just inclines her head slightly. Hannibal accepts it.

"Have I interrupted something?"

"Not at all," Will says. Freddie can see them communicating something between their eyes. "Freddie was just wondering...if we ever like a little company in bed."

"Gracious," Hannibal says, with absolutely no intonation whatsoever.

Maybe Will gleans something from this response; Freddie cannot. Hannibal takes a seat and crosses his legs.

"Stand up, Ms. Lounds."

She and Will both rise, and Will moves to stand beside Hannibal's chair, looking like a sultan's vizier. Freddie feels naked before them, and she finally realizes she's not wearing pants. Her heart is beating fast and she has no idea what's happening. In her stoned mind it feels like some weird ritual.

They all wait. For what, Freddie doesn't know.

Slowly Freddie pulls the oversize t-shirt she wears to bed over her head and drops it to the concrete surface of the balcony. The floodlight on the wall between the two sets of sliding doors illuminates her nakedness. A cool curl of air plays across the balcony, swirling her auburn curls around her bare neck, stiffening her nipples.

Dr. Lecter is piercing her with his reptilian eyes, looking straight through her pale flesh to the organs working inside her. She can feel it, she can feel him peering into her, and half-defiantly, to show she's not scared, she slips her panties down her thighs to join the nightshirt on the ground.

Will's expression she cannot read, but Dr. Lecter's is clearly appraisal. Freddie is trapped by it, frozen in his hypnotic gaze, like a charmed snake. Another little breeze raises goosebumps on her small breasts. Hannibal's eyes linger on them, take in the spare but not bony curves of her. She's slight, but never before has she thought of herself as delicate because of it. Under his gaze she feels very breakable.

"Shall we allow Ms. Lounds to chose her own fate?" he asks Will, softly.

Will approaches her. His face is cold now. He's back on the other side, with Hannibal. Freddie stands still as a statue.

Very gently he touches her neck, gently wraps his hands around her throat and tilts her face up. She meets his eyes with just a hint of trepidation.

It would be easy to assume that this Graham is a false face, a front put on for Hannibal, or that this one is really him, and the Graham she smoked up with a few minutes ago lives now only as a vestigial holdover from the man she once knew. It's harder to accept that they co-exist, that a soul contains multitudes, that people are contradictions. There is no real Will Graham, or rather there is only one Will, both true and false. These different Wills are not masks, implying some true core, but two of many facets, imperfections, inclusions.

"I don't think she understands what it is she's asking," Will says, an answer meant for Hannibal but directed at her.

Will has to bend to kiss Freddie, and he tightens his grip on her throat at the same time. She can't avoid making a small choking sound but she kisses him back, arousal mingling with her fear. His tongue tastes like pot smoke and whiskey. He tastes like he wants her.

She wonders what Hannibal Lecter tastes like.

"Freddie," Will whispers when they break, a little more the man she shared the joint with, "I don't think you want this. If you do this, you will officially be in too deep. Right now you're an observer. If you...involve yourself with us tonight, you will be flirting dangerously with _participation._ Someday you may want to consult with Dr. Du Maurier on what that means."

Dr. Lecter is watching the exchange carefully. Most likely he can hear every word.

"It _changes_ you," Will says. He's trying, urgently and sadly, to warn her about something that he has no name for. "Don't you see it, Freddie? Can't you see how I've changed?"

Freddie nods and swallows hard, prompting Will to take his hands off her throat, as if he just now realized they were there. He lets one of them drift over her body, her shoulder, her ribs, her hip, and come back up to rest on her breast, brushing against her hard nipple. He looks at her with reluctant restraint and turns away.

Hannibal's chair is empty. Will walks to the dark rectangle of the doorway and looks back at her, still standing naked under the floodlight. He is letting her choose.

"He would let you in," Will says, his voice strange. "You could come with me now, if you wanted to."

"Would I be in danger?" she whispers.

"You'll always be in danger. You've been in danger since the day you met him. All of us are. All of _you._ You were in danger before you came to us, and you're in danger...right now."

With that, he steps into the room, the black inside seeming to swallow him. The door he leaves open for her. Freddie hears the bed creak as he climbs in.

Freddie stands there for a very long moment. She tries to think about that groundbreaking book she's going to write, the one that's going to blow Dr. Chilton's sordid pack of lies out of the water and make her a famous investigative journalist, not just Fredricka Lounds, writes for that tasteless supermarket rag, comes up with a new cure for cancer and a new hideout for Elvis every week. Maybe she'll even get a Pulitzer.

Journalism is a dangerous business if you do it right. Some of her brothers in arms willingly go to war zones, knowing in their hearts that the little taste of immortality they long for may indeed be theirs, but not as a Pulitzer. Instead fate may have it that their legacy will be a viral video of a beheading, and solemn posthumous paeans to their bravery and integrity, to the journalistic spirit, the quest for truth they sacrificed everything for. Cold comfort to their widows and widowers.

If she doesn't make it out of this, she will not have even that. No one on her braindead staff is going to write a mournful editorial in _Tattle Crime_ for her. It may be that they never even know what happened to her or find her body, unless they cut Dr. Lecter open after they shoot him down, like a rogue Great White, and her undigested arm tumbles out along with the dead fish and license plates.

Freddie goes back to her own bed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you very much for reading! Please comment or hit me up at stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com!!!
> 
> Please check out the Badlands playlist! https://open.spotify.com/user/1226331128/playlist/0y4bnqzpez8pQaQKvfpQ4D


	10. 9 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has figured it out: the why.
> 
> Our ability to see one another is the product of two zeros; we cancel out, and that is the point where the veil can be parted.
> 
> Hannibal finds himself driving fast—recklessly anywhere but the open empty desert. He feels like an Ascended Master has just whispered a gnostic secret in his ear. There is that rare scent of epiphany.
> 
> Always he has longed to solve the puzzle. What was it about Will that reacted in him, the precise point of their conjoining? Where was the rip in the veil?

> _When this kiss is over, it will start again_  
>  _It will not be any different, it will be exactly the same_
> 
> _It's hard to imagine that nothing at all_  
>  _Could be so exciting, could be this much fun_
> 
> _Heaven, Heaven is a place_  
>  _A place where nothing, nothing ever happens_
> 
> _—Talking Heads, "Heaven"_
> 
>  

> _In heaven, everything is fine_  
>  _In heaven, everything is fine_  
>  _In heaven, everything is fine_  
>  _You got your good things, and I've got mine_  
>  _You got your good things, and you got mine_  
>  _In heaven, everything is fine_
> 
> _—Peter Ivers, "In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)"_

 

"Hey, what is that?" Will laughs.

"Marijuana," Hannibal replies calmly, lighting up. Surreptitiously plucked from Freddie's purse.  The smell is strong; to Hannibal room-filling and nearly intolerable. Will's delighted.

"Lord. Guess I'll never know Hannibal Lecter."

"M.D.," Hannibal adds, curling to face him on the motel bed, handling the joint as elegantly as Hepburn's cigarette holder. "I'm surprised by your surprise, Will. I'd assumed you knew by now I'm unknowable."

"Should expect the unexpected, I suppose."

"By now," repeated thickly, holding his hit. Will's grin widens.

"Very attractive, doctor."

Hannibal raises his eyebrows, ruffles Will's hair with his smoke. Will affects a hacking cough.

"Give me that."

He takes a hit. "Did you want her to come with us, Hannibal?" he asks, casually, as he passes the joint back. Hannibal blows a series of perfect smoke rings and Will is violently jealous.

"I don't think I did, my darling. More cozy, perhaps, than I'd like to be with Freddie at this time."

"I thought you liked Freddie."

"I would like to fuck her," Hannibal says, leaning in, "but regrettably, I trust her very little, and this seemed the wiser course."

"You say that like you made the decision for her."

The floodlight outside glinting in his eyes. "All of our actions influenced it. No decision in a vacuum."

"I see. So you purposely intimidated her to change her mind?"

"Not at all. Attempting to scare her would have had the opposite result. Ms. Lounds is very preoccupied with proving herself just now. Had I given her the opportunity to do so, we could have done as we liked with her."

"But you didn't want to."

"Not _just_ yet," he says. "I have other ideas."

"You generally do."

"I thought we might do something...for us," Hannibal says, tracing his fingertips over Will's chest. "Something that is ours. Something grounding."

It's actually very thoughtful. Will can feel the pebbles of the avalanche that's coming on in his head, and just carrying the knowledge has been draining him, making him that much more susceptible to the panic attack earlier. They haven't talked about it yet, but they will have to soon. It makes him feel a little more secure to make crisis plans.

In this mode, on the eve of war, sometimes new situations throw his internal sense of time into disarray and he dissociates. That would have been bad, and Will hadn't even thought about it. Having a PTSD episode while fucking Freddie Lounds with his boyfriend is not exactly on his bucket list.

"What did you have in mind?" as Hannibal's fingertips circle around his nipple, raising the hair on his neck.

"You." The subtle supplication in his face makes his meaning clear. "I want you to love me, Will."

Will takes an eidetic snapshot for when he forgets that Hannibal does things like this and wraps his arms around his lover, nuzzling his face, a little twinge in his chest. _So he's in this mood, is he. It's been a while. Everything is back where it started. Time is circular, alright._

Last night Will had dreamt of the place he now thinks of as home: the tiny, bare house by the ocean where Will and Hannibal spent their first year, purgatory, the house which had no proper address or name that he knew of. But then again, they could have been hiding out in a cardboard box under an overpass and Will would still remember it in soft focus, with pervading warmth. It had seemed unreal, how good that year was.

 

_Will, with his tenuous relationship to reality, thinks sometimes that they must not have really survived, because none of this can be actually happening. It's better than his life has ever been, which in the eyes of victim souls like Will means it can't be real. It's almost too good, too perfect, and not boringly, but so that Will sometimes feels like he can't handle the strength of his happiness and emotion. He doesn't know how to do it—there has never been a solid period of happiness in his life._

_Hannibal is teaching him how to be happy, and that is also terrifying in its implications. For a brief, glorious moment, a few days at most, he had been swept up in the otherworldly tide of the love between he and Hannibal—Hannibal refers to it as their "Becoming." He did become, but_ what _he has become he's not sure, and he's beginning to wonder. In the heat of those days, it had not mattered. What mattered was the process, the surge of sudden change, the blood and breath fueling his radiance._

 _Suddenly Will sees the interconnectedness. It's the same as with Hobbs. It knocks his brain off its axis and for a moment he thinks,_ I took him in too. Francis Dolarhyde ate the Dragon—and we ate up Francis Dolarhyde. _They had not taken souvenirs from the Dragon's body, except with their teeth during the fight, but maybe there had been some eating...Will honestly cannot say for sure one way or the other. He remembers the blood running down his chin, the chunks of flesh in his mouth...but not what happened to them after that._

_That would be very different, somehow, than Hannibal's civilized salad-fork method of consuming his enemies, or rather his pet peeves. To tear away with his teeth, and eat, pieces of a fellow human being's body, gory and raw, while killing him, killing him joyfully in a more heightened erotic state than he'd ever experienced before...that was...a lot to process about himself, if that was what had happened._

_These things intrude on the perfect happiness from time to time. Things he doesn't and can't remember. Things his brain has decided to keep on a need-to-know basis. Hannibal might be able to "help," hypnotize him or slip a little needle into his arm, but Will feels quite firmly that if his brain has declared something verboten, it may be wise to leave it be, at least for now. It has been an intensely changeful year, dominated by the highs of loving Hannibal, being in love, and the lows of bouts of serious mental instability, and Will would rather leave sleeping dogs to lie whenever possible. He gets more than he can handle already without kicking up the (still very recent) past._

_Will is irritated at himself for not learning the obvious lesson with Molly. Love does not affect mental illness, at least not in the way Will would like (getting rid of it entirely). It sands a few of the edges, and this is still the happiest he's ever been, but Hannibal...is perfect. Some part of Will will always truly believe that Hannibal is by definition perfect, no matter what he's done or ever could do. He has perfected the art of being Hannibal Lecter._

_Will wishes he could be perfect for Hannibal, too. Hannibal deserves perfection. Perfection and beauty in his surroundings make Hannibal noticeably easier, as if he's where he belongs, in among all the other perfect things, and Will wishes he could give him back his perfect home, his books, his kitchen, or failing that, at least be perfect for him himself._

_Will is aware now that Hannibal has worshiped him from afar for a long time, but somehow remained unaware, until all this, that he had worshiped Hannibal too. That's what made it so inescapable—at some point, Will became the only thing Hannibal cared about, and vice versa, and Will could never pin it down, right when it happened, but from that moment on the switch was flipped and there was no going back. Of course he knew it when he proposed to Molly: but what else could he_ do? _What could he possibly do to "move on" from the other half of his own soul? Once he knew his soul was incomplete, he understood it, everything that had ever happened to him. Even in his head it sounds a little crazy, a little like the seed of a delusion, but it just makes so much sense. The simplest explanation._

 _It brings victim souls to mind again._ _Saint Thérèse, the Little Flower of Jesus, coughing herself to death at 24:_ _"I only love simplicity. I have a horror of pretense."_

And then there's things like that, _Will thinks, feeling another touch of dread._ How do I know that? How? _He had grown up in Louisiana, and was thus reasonably acquainted with several strains of Christian and Christian-inflected religion, but...he's certain,_ sure, _that he had never known one single thing about_ _Saint Thérèse before that thought popped into his head. It's very disturbing. He feels that he is literally thinking Hannibal's thoughts now._

 _But in truth, in all truth, the lingering question of what he and Hannibal have Become together does not haunt many of his days during that year. Their life is very busy—they are constantly occupied with each other. For a year_ _they live between the bed and the little back porch that faces the water, waking up and fucking and drinking and fucking and eating and talking and fucking and falling asleep._

_They are so in love that it scares Will out of his wits. Every way he's ever been in love, lightly and deeply and lustfully and intellectually, he is discovering in his love for Hannibal. It is everything at once._

_Sometimes he feels like Narcissus drowning in his reflection. Other times he feels like he has found someone so opposite that they maintain a perfect, delicious surface tension._

_He is not afraid. He is never afraid. He does not think this is temporary, that Hannibal will get bored after a month and he'll wake up dead. If it ends, he feels certain, it will be because they kill_ each other. _From now on they will live or die together._

 

It seems so long ago, although it hasn't even been a week since they left. Mentally he counts it—six days. Five days ago he was playfully splashing Hannibal with suds in the tiny shower of that cramped motel in Alabama. Five days? Everything is so different now. Things are serious again, and Will thinks wistfully of waking up in their own bedroom with the pink sunrise filtering through the white gauze curtains, faint gull cries, Hannibal there every morning for him to cuddle against in their warm bed and the way he felt so happy, so at peace at last. Could that have really been purgatory, if this is meant to be heaven?

Will wants to stop this. He thinks he'll bring it up tonight, but not yet, because he wants to fuck Hannibal with nothing between them, so he can enjoy it.

Will doesn't think of topping as any better than the role he generally prefers, but it is different, and rare, for them. Both of them thoroughly enjoy their usual arrangement, and it's nice to have something for special occasions, or for when Will is losing himself in his head. For whatever reason it clears Will's mind a little, dispels some doubt about the choice he made to be with Hannibal, reminds him that there was never really a choice. He had to have Hannibal, or he would have killed himself. That's the long and short of it. He might have held out for years, but eventually he would have had to find a way to be with Hannibal or die. He wasn't strong enough to live indefinitely without him, knowing exactly where to find him, knowing he was also slowly wilting without Will.

Topping Hannibal also rescales the balance of power a bit. The exact distribution of influence in their relationship is constantly shifting: Will averages passive, Hannibal active, but there are many reverse currents and areas where one of them holds sway more or less permanently. Their sexual dynamic is so steeped in powerplay and head games that every act has a particular weight, an unspoken import, a message in the private language that has grown up between them. The way they fuck is a microcosm of the state of their relationship.

It's their equation, their arithmetic. Will's conception of it is felt, not thought out; Hannibal is the one who has more of an engineer's grasp on it, and Will trusts him to keep the plates spinning by making adjustments when Will starts getting worse mentally and loses track.

Hannibal apparently thinks about the exact workings of their relationship often, and when he has some little realization about the mechanics of it, he'll tell Will. Recently a big one came to Hannibal during a driving shift, and its formulation was so elegant, so mathematical that Hannibal pulled over to shake Will awake and tell him immediately.

 

_He has figured it out: the why._

Our ability to see one another is the product of two zeros; we cancel out, and that is the point where the veil can be parted.

_Hannibal finds himself driving fast—recklessly anywhere but the open empty desert. He feels like an Ascended Master has just whispered a gnostic secret in his ear. There is that rare scent of epiphany._

_Always he has longed to solve the puzzle. What was it about Will that reacted in him, the precise point of their conjoining? Where was the rip in the veil?_

_Bedelia, that silly self-important thing, had bragged to Will about having "been with him behind the veil" in Florence. Yes; the outer one. Bedelia had made it from the court to the holy place, but she had not had access to the_ sanctum sanctorum. _Through that veil Will alone passes, his only priest. Had Bedelia peeked, she would be dead, fried like a denizen of the Old Testament who sees God's uncovered glory._

And he said, Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.

_Will lived. And now he knows why._

_Hannibal was unpredictable to Will because he felt very little. A side effect, the side effect that made this all possible, was that failing an emotional state from Hannibal to reflect, Will was forced to be himself._

It terrified him at first, _Hannibal remembers; he had thought Will had picked up on what he was, with his abnormally overgrown empathy, and was afraid he would be killed for it._

_Gradually he realized Will was frightened by being seen. He had been invisible for so long, like a Perseus behind the mirrored shield of his empathy, that Hannibal appeared to him like the Gorgon. It was the intriguing thought, the spark of interest, that first begat the obsession. What would he see in such a true mirror? What would become of the man who began to empathize with a lack of empathy? The concept had excited Hannibal like a perfect turn of phrase._

_Now, like a long-delayed recoil, comes the second layer of the double exposure. Hannibal's emotions are too slight for Will to mirror; Will's are too powerful for him to ignore. They_ affect _Hannibal._

His emotions are like opera, _he thinks. It's possibly the highest compliment Will will ever not know he has received._

_Hannibal's only concept of empathy on a personal level had been obtained through poetry, music, opera, where the synthetic emotions were potent enough for him to sense them in himself. He had counted the little thrill of brushing up against a foreign emotion among his indulgences with food and wine. This man...meeting Will, spending time with him, had been like being transported into opera's heightened reality, like a dissociative drug, and Hannibal had found himself sinking into addiction. He could not go back._

_He knew this was how he would die._

_He had stumbled upon his_ hamartia,  _his tragic flaw, his downfall. It was already too late when he realized this, but he'd been watching all his life for it, knowing that if immortality was possible, he would be functionally immortal until its reveal. Until the moment Will was revealed to him._

_He had never predicted the fate he'd meet would be this, would make him feel like a willing slave, that he could fall in love with the thing that would end him. Its discovery was both the worst and finest moment of his life._

_Now he understands. His personal deal with the Devil is double-edged. Killing with Will takes him higher than he could ever get without him, but he'll never be free again. His Becoming was his choice to become mortal, fated to die._

_He wonders if his birth, or perhaps Mischa's death, was an experiment overhead, like the card game for Job. The Devil had created in his own image, too, and if Hannibal didn't fall for God's best effort at exploiting his only weakness, the Devil could take his creation along as his personal ax-man as he went to and fro in the Earth,_ and _walked up and down in it, just as long as he pleased._

 _It coalesces:_ Will is the immovable object.

 

"Lay down on your back for me," Will tells the unstoppable force. Hannibal lets Will lay him down, draping his arms loosely around Will's neck, kissing him deeply and savoring the taste of him. Will moves down the bed to give him head first and Hannibal sighs with pleasure.

He reaches backward to grab Will the lube from the nightstand and Will kisses his thigh as he puts some on himself, then continues to suck his cock, slipping fingers into Hannibal to prepare him. Hannibal moves a pillow further under his head so he can watch, the weak spot lamp above his side of the bed the only light, illuminating Will's face against the darkness behind.

As Will pushes a third finger inside, Hannibal's eyebrows contract toward the middle slightly and a quiet "ah..." escapes him. Will looks up at him and smiles.

"More than you can handle, old man?"

"Old compared to Ms. Lounds, perhaps," Hannibal says disdainfully. Will grins. "You're ten years her senior yourself."

"She's too young for us," Will says teasingly as he withdraws and climbs over him. "She's barely older than all those little girls putting up pictures of us in their lockers right now."

Hannibal actually laughs at that. It's not far from the truth. That's another thing: he isn't opposed to eventually fucking someone else with Will—he's not at all an insecure or jealous lover—but no one should _ever_ come between them, and he does not see now as a good time to open the door to anything that might foster a closer relationship between themselves and Freddie. They need to present a unified front, keep her firmly on the _them_ side. Things will go more smoothly.

Will lowers his lips to Hannibal's, kissing him softly, and says, "Are you ready, baby?" Will never calls him that. He nods, smiling against his lips.

Hannibal makes no sound but exhales slow and deep as Will slides inside him.

"Good God _damn,"_ Will says under his breath, already panting, "oh, _fuck,_ Hannibal..." It's been a while.

"Don't stop."

"Oh, I'm not going to _stop,_ trust me. Just... _mmm..."_

Hannibal presses his hips up to Will's, kissing his chest. Before long at all, though, he's overcome, he has to let his head fall back to the pillow. Hannibal moans—Will's thrusts into him are slow, steady, his cock is so deep inside him and it's been far too long since Will filled him up like this...he tries to clear his bustling mind of everything else and just feel it, fully appreciate how Will feels in his body.

"Do you like it, baby?" Will murmurs, nuzzling his lips against Hannibal's ear.

"Why...are _you..._ calling me that?" Hannibal asks, amused. Of course he likes this. It's his favorite thing they do. That's part of why they do it so infrequently—he could never allow this beautiful moment to become usual, unremarkable. This is everything to him.

"I don't know. Do you mind?"

 _"No,"_ he says, clinging tighter to Will's neck. "Whatever... _you..."_ He trails off into another moan. It's getting faster, and Hannibal couldn't care less what Will calls him, as long as he doesn't stop fucking him. Will is very aware of that. Hannibal suspects Will may just like to ask him questions while his cock is in him so he can watch Hannibal struggling to string words together.

"Oh, baby," Will whispers, hoarse, bowing his head a little, "oh, fuck, you're so _tight,_ Hannibal...you feel so good, baby..."

 _"Harder,"_ is all Hannibal manages in response, and Will is only human. It's the thud through his body of the heavier impacts that does it for Hannibal, they kiss hard and rough, Will pressing his lips to Hannibal's jaw instead when he gasps for air, coming. Will slows but doesn't stop, long deep strokes, until he grips Hannibal to him harder and groans, "yes, _fuck..._ Hannibal..."

"Oh, you sweet thing," Hannibal says quietly, his own rarely-used petname _._ Will rests his hot cheek against Hannibal's chest as it rises and falls and hears that his heart is pounding. Usually it's steady and calm even in life-or-death situations. He feels very content.

"I love you, baby."

"I love you too."

"Hannibal, I want to go home."

 

"Margot, where's my briefcase?"

"Wherever you put it," Margot answers unhelpfully. She's preoccupied with trying to get food into their child before taking him to preschool. Morgan is fussing this morning, not wanting to cooperate, and it doesn't improve her mood. Alana had come home from "work" drunk yesterday, bolted down dinner and passed out very soon after on the couch so that Margot had the rest of the evening to fume and worry and take care of Morgan by herself, which is usually Alana's job in the evenings since Margot has him all day.

She watches the news on the kitchen counter TV behind him as their sweet little gift flings another handful of wet Cheerios in her lap, crying "Mommy!" _Mommy_ is Alana; Margot is _Momma._ Mommy had carried him, and somehow that seems to have made him Mommy's boy more than Momma's.

"I need to get ready for work, sweetie. Be a good boy for Momma and eat your breakfast," Alana says indistinctly, kneeling with her head in the closet, digging through the pile of shoes and umbrellas for her briefcase.

"Mommy nooo," Morgan wails, and Margot hastens to distract him so it doesn't become a full-fledged tantrum, trying to keep an eye on the TV for news on Will and Hannibal. They've been the top story in the morning and the evening reports for the last five days and she didn't see the news last night, too busy playing an eternal game of cars with Morgan on the rug in his room that looks like a town and cursing Alana.

Alana's supermarket flower arrangement, with its drunkenly-overlooked "Get Well Soon" card on a little stick, did not help either: she had already gotten several tours of Rug Town by that time yesterday, and each of them had lasted at least an hour.

"Alana, come here and look at this," Margot says sharply. Alana hears her tone and gets up immediately.

Freddie Lounds is missing. The newswoman explains that her cameraman witnessed the abduction and immediately called the FBI tipline. Apparently she _had_ known where the Murder Husbands were, and flew to the Southwest to meet them in person for an unknown reason. She had not informed the cameraman of the trip's purpose, just offered him two weeks' pay to keep it under his hat.

Alana stares, transfixed, as she interviews the cameraman. Thankfully Margot is too distracted by trying to shush Morgan to notice her expression of despair.

 _That dumb bitch...what was she_ doing? _I thought Freddie Lounds was a_ little _smarter than that. And she's known where they were this whole time and just let them keep getting away with it?_

More importantly...Freddie is in the way now. She's a human shield. If the feds catch up to the Murder Husbands because of this development, they're not going to risk a blind shootout with Freddie Lounds riding fucking shotgun in Will Graham's lap.

 _"Shit,"_ Alana says emphatically, and Morgan echoes _"shit!"_ Margot sighs and pushes a Thermos into Alana's hand.

"Check the upstairs closet," is all she says. Without a word, Alana turns numbly and walks towards the stairs.

When she returns, briefcase in hand, Margot is at the bottom of the stairs. "You got a phone call," she says, expressionless, and hands her her phone. The missed call is from Frederick Chilton. She looks at Margot, mouth open, not sure what to say.

"When you get home, we are talking about this, _and_ yesterday," Margot says. Alana just nods and hurries out of the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, well, it took me a while (I got too zeroed in on trying to force the plot forward, I think) but here you go! A really long bunch of bullshit about Will and Hannibal's buttsex-related feelings. lol. No but really this chapter contains something that I've been saving for a while because I loved it so much, Hannibal's epiphany, and generally there's a lot of stuff about how I think their relationship would work, which is really all that matters, right? That & Will calling Hannibal "baby" and telling him how tight he is?
> 
> I would also like to take this opportunity to point you to [THIS](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8065705), [Caveat_Lector's](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Caveat_Lector/pseuds/Caveat_Lector) newly posted podfic of my story "Quid Pro Quo"!!!! It's amazing PLEASE check it out!!!
> 
> stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com


	11. 2 Apocrypha

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Ask me to do it," Hannibal murmurs against Will's lips.

Much of their first year consists of exhaustive sexual experimentation. Will has been with a handful of women, but the years he spent guiltily going through the motions with Molly have given sex a lot of bad associations for him. Many nights he talks it through with Hannibal, although somewhat obliquely, because Molly is still a tender spot in him he isn't ready to test. The whole subject is touchy; many conversations take place with Will naked and tearful in Hannibal's arms, after things become too much during sex and he breaks down.

He loves Hannibal, and he loves having sex with him, and he just wants to be able to really let go and enjoy it. After yet another talk along those lines, they are holding each other in silence.

Then: "There are things we could do, Will."

Will is sick of the whole thing and he wants to forget it, although he knows that forgetting it will only work for a day or two until it happens again. He thinks he'd rather shoot himself in the foot than listen to another lecture, too. But he lets him talk.

"Your brain has associated physical pleasure with guilt and shame. To free yourself, you must either break the association, or assimilate it."

"Assimilate it."

"Yes. Handle the feeling until it no longer frightens you, warm it with your hands to body temperature. Play with it."

"How does one 'play' with shame?"

"That part is easy, my dear."

It is a simple plan, and it works beautifully.

 

"Ask me to do it," Hannibal murmurs against Will's lips.

Will inhales through his nose. They stay very close. Hannibal has been teasing him mercilessly for over an hour, sucking his cock, rimming him, doing everything but, but not letting him come. Will is sweaty and frustrated and miserable. He _wants_ it, he needs Hannibal's cock inside him, but Hannibal is not one to be swayed from his goal by puppy dog eyes. Will knows if he doesn't open his mouth and say what Hannibal wants to hear now, he'll probably just get up and walk into the other room and leave him like this. But...

"I _can't,"_ he whines, red-faced. "I can't, Hannibal, it's just..."

"Tell me."

"I'm just...I don't..."

"Are you ashamed of me? Are you ashamed to want me, Will?"

"No..."

"Then ask."

"Please."

"Wrong." He kisses Will and jerks him off hard and fast until Will is straining at the brink, then stops immediately. Will moans.

 _"...please._..please, Hannibal..."

"You're so close, Will..." he whispers, and hearing Hannibal say his name, his rich voice roughened by deep throating Will's cock several separate times in the past hour, makes Will feel like he's losing his mind. He _is_ close, so close, so fucking close.

"Please," he says, taking an unsteady breath, desperate enough at last, "please...I want you to...fuck me."

"Why should I?" Hannibal's amusement is mixed with pity.

Will nearly starts crying. He was just supposed to ask for it, not explain _why._

"I said it," he pleads, pulling at Hannibal's hips uselessly. Hannibal smiles. "Stop smiling! You're killing me!"

"Oh, my darling," Hannibal says, kissing his dripping forehead, "my dear, sweet Will. When I'm killing you, you'll know."

"You're evil."

"So I've been told. Just tell me why, darling...tell me, and I swear I will fuck you so hard you won't mind if I do kill you."

Will shuts his eyes and thinks, trying to ignore Hannibal sucking and pinching his nipples. Is there an answer he wants specifically? Something he should know? Or does he just have to give a sincere answer? Sometimes he feels like he's fucking the Sphinx.

Finally he says, carefully affectless, totally defeated, "Because I need it."

"'It'?"

"No." Will shifts under him as if caught in a lie. "You. I need _you_ to fuck me, Hannibal. Please."

"Well, when you ask so _nicely..."_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another little porny non-chapter...haha.
> 
> stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com


	12. 10 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "When I took this post from Dr. Chilton, I promised myself that if Will ever showed up, I would tell him you had lost your visitor privileges and send him home to his wife. You would have never known. But you know what, Dr. Lecter? I've never had to do that. Will Graham has not tried to visit you. He has never sent you one piece of mail. He has never called."
> 
> "I am aware," Hannibal says, voice dangerously quiet.
> 
> "He doesn't care. He doesn't love you. You're pathetic. You put yourself in here for him, and you're going to rot and die here in this room without seeing his face or hearing his voice or fucking smelling him ever again."
> 
> CHAPTER-SPECIFIC TWs: suicide, miscarriage, maybe drugging?

> _Who am I to need you when I'm down?_  
>  _And where are you when I need you around?_  
>  _Your life is not your own_  
>  _And all I ask you is for another chance_  
>  _Another way around you_  
>  _To live by circumstance once again_
> 
> _Who am I to need you now?_  
>  _To ask you why, to tell you no?_  
>  _To deserve your love and sympathy?_  
>  _You were never meant to belong to me_
> 
> _And you may go but I know you won't leave_  
>  _Too many years built into memories_  
>  _Your life is not your own_
> 
> _Who am I to need you now?_  
>  _To ask you why, to tell you no?_  
>  _To deserve your love and sympathy?_  
>  _You were never meant to belong to me_
> 
> _Who am I to you?_  
>  _Along the way, I lost my faith_
> 
> _And as you were, you'll be again_  
>  _To mold like clay, to break like dirt_  
>  _To tear me up in your sympathy_  
>  _You were never meant to belong to me_  
>  _You were never meant to belong to me_  
>  _You were never meant to belong to me_
> 
> _Who am I? Who am I?_  
>  _Who am I? Who am I?_
> 
> _—The Smashing Pumpkins, "Crestfallen"_

 

_"Congratulations," Dr. Lecter says, standing over his table with his back to the door._

_Alana stops short._

_"What did you say?"_

_"Congratulations to you and Margot." He sets down the drawings he's examining and turns to face her, leans on the table. It's bolted to the floor and can take his weight. "On the successful pregnancy."_

_"Thank you." Alana's face feels numb from the strain of maintaining a neutral expression. Hannibal smiles; his smiles are a little easy for her taste these days, a little too carefree and toothy._

_"I take it you didn't know. How pleasant to be the bearer of such good news."_

_"I...we were waiting to hear..." She doesn't really want to feed Hannibal any information about their family, but most likely he already knows more than she's aware of. He_ knows _things. The idea that he smelled her pregnancy is revolting to her._

Did he say...successful?

_"Incidentally, Dr. Bloom...you're welcome."_

_She doesn't acknowledge it. "I need you to sign this form."_

_"In a moment. How_ are _you, Alana? How are you feeling?"_

Nauseous. Angry. Anxious. _"This isn't really your business, Hannibal."_

_"Oh, but it is, in a way." He lets her think that over. "I'm sure you're feeling relieved. After the first try."_

_Now Alana's blood runs colder. She opens her mouth and closes it again._

_"How..."_ What would give him the least satisfaction? How can I respond other than by kicking his teeth in? Don't get upset. Don't get upset.

_Hannibal merely taps his nose in reply and watches her, expressionless. Alana takes a deep breath and puts the form in his meal tray._

_"Sign it."_

_"Do you have a name picked out? Not the same one as before, I assume. It will be tarnished now."_

_Alana's eyes sting but she does not cry. Instead she looks defiantly into Dr. Lecter's calm face._

_"You've changed," she says._

_"You did not truly know me before. That's all."_

_"No. You're different. Crueler."_

_No response, just cool, steady burgundy eyes. Her blood is changing rapidly from ice to something like hot molten steel, burning from the inside out._

_"Why don't you tell_ me _something, Dr. Lecter? Why don't you tell me what changed you?_ Who _changed you?"_

 _"One has to try to keep one's sense of humor even in the direst of circumstances, Dr. Bloom. Perhaps you sense the_ ennui _of the incarcerated man."_

 _"No, I don't think so," she says quickly, too loud. "I don't stop your letters, Dr. Lecter, I send them right on after I read them. I read them, but_ he _doesn't. He doesn't reply. He doesn't care about you."_

_If anything changes, it's not visible. Hannibal reaches for the form in the tray and Alana snatches it back._

_"No, you're going to listen to this," she says, pressure building inside her, propelling the words from her mouth. "When I took this post from Dr. Chilton, I promised myself that if Will ever showed up, I would tell him you had lost your visitor privileges and send him home to his wife. You would have never known. But you know what, Dr. Lecter? I've never had to do that. Will Graham has not tried to visit you. He has never sent you one piece of mail. He has never called."_

_"I am aware," Hannibal says, voice dangerously quiet._

_"He doesn't care. He doesn't love you. You're pathetic. You put yourself in here for him, and you're going to rot and die here in this room without seeing his face or hearing his voice or fucking_ smelling _him ever again."_

_Alana hates herself, feels like she's stooping to his level, but she wants to hurt him. She wants Hannibal to fucking suffer. This is the only spot she can think to aim for, and God knows he deserves it, but it still feels like a low blow._

This isn't me. I'm not like this. This is because of him.  

 _But still Hannibal does not react. She needs it, the satisfaction. She needs to_ know. _It makes her feel dirty. But the next words are already forming on her tongue and it's too late to stop them._

 _"Will_ doesn't love you," _she says again, very clear._ "No one _loves you. It's laughable that you think he_ could _love you. You're an empty fucking shell. You're dead inside, and the sooner the rest of you catches up, the better."_

_Nothing._

_Then, slowly, a ghastly mockery of a smile spreads across his face. It horrifies her. It's as if Dr. Lecter has temporarily let drop his seamless imitation of humanity, and the unearthly_ thing _beneath now deforms his features instead._

 _"Oh,_ thank you, _Dr. Bloom," he says, through that gruesome rictus. "You've given me more than I dared hope for. Of_ course _I'll sign your form."_

 

Alice comes to the door with a dirty look for Alana after thirty seconds of pounding it with her fist.

"He's indisposed," she sneers, before she can ask.

"Can I wait?"

Chilton's caretaker clearly wants to say no, but instead she turns silently and leads her through the dim first floor to the bright daylight of the porch.

"Get you anything."

"Bourbon."

She disappears without another word. Alana hopes she'll actually let Dr. Chilton know she's here.

In his bedroom Chilton is performing the tedious daily chore of slathering his fragile skin grafts thickly with lotion. As nearly all of him is skin grafts, it's a long and annoying process. Generally he uses this time to reflect on his deep hatred for Will Graham and Dr. Lecter. It's hard not to, while being forced to deal so intimately with what they've done to him.

Technically, since she is his nurse, he could have Alice do this, but he never has. He knows that she would hate it, and he can't stand the idea of feeling her disgust.

"She's back," Alice yells from the hall. Chilton grimaces.

"I have told you not to fucking _yell,_ woman," he mutters to himself. He finishes up and gets dressed, hobbles downstairs and sinks into his wheelchair with a sigh. It takes very little activity to fatigue him now. Alice is nowhere to be seen, so he grudgingly wheels to the porch himself.

"What are we going to do?" Alana demands immediately upon his appearance.

 _"We."_ Chilton is darkly amused by the word. "I do not recall any _we._ _My_ name is not connected with this at all."

"It was your plan!"

 _"Bullshit,_ Dr. Bloom. You may have convinced yourself of that, but not me. I assisted you with _your_ plan, yes, but I warned you that I would not be sticking my neck out."

Alice appears with Alana's drink; Chilton eyes her and she returns momentarily with one for him.

"I see you made yourself at home," he grumbles. Alana drinks half of her bourbon down in a gulp, sighing in relief when it hits her already-ravaged stomach lining. She can almost hear the hiss. It feels right. It feels like righteous anger.

"Who, may I ask, is herding the loonies while you are here drinking my Knob Creek? Have they trained an especially bright sheepdog?"

"I'm the director, I can do what I want. You did."

"A fat lot of good it did me. _Prestigious._ I should have never given up _real_ medicine."

"I heard they made you give it up."

"Whatever," Chilton says bitterly, drinking his neat breakfast bourbon through a little straw. It's easier that way when you have no lips.

"Didn't he ever say anything to you?" she asks, grasping. "Did he give you anything useful?"

"Dr. Lecter does not give. He takes."

 _Oh,_ thank you, _Dr. Bloom. You've given me more than I dared hope for._

Alana thinks hard. She feels like something is on the edge of revealing itself to her, but she can't quite see it. Admittedly the plan to sow dissent between them had been weak and lethally vague. She had hoped (and rightly, if she only knew) that Will would protest the idea of killing her and her family, and that faced with the decision, Hannibal would choose Will once again. Failing that, if Will Graham was really gone, she could at least lure them out, hide her family somewhere, alert the cops ahead of time...

_Ugh, it would have never worked anyway..._

She's been letting desperation and fear blind her, _again._ This time she groans audibly.

"What will they do with her, do you think?" Chilton asks absently. "Eat her? Or just _eat_ her?"

"What?"

Chilton rolls his eyes at her. "Do you think they took her to kill her, or to fuck her? I assume she is not just along for the _ride._ Perhaps between the two of them put together, a speck of heterosexuality still remains."

Alana hates Chilton with a passion, declines to take the subject any further. She puts her elbows on her knees and the heels of her hands into her eyes.

"Think," she murmurs to herself. All she can see is that inhuman smile, the likes of which she never saw on Hannibal before or since. She thinks she may have seen something Hannibal keeps hidden from everyone...or maybe something only the dead have seen.

It's warm, very warm and humid out right now and she shudders in disgust. Chilton watches her from the corner of his good eye and sucks his straw.

He is not entirely sure what this is about. It seems to him that Hannibal and Will have little to no interest in Alana at all. Her obsession lingers with nothing to hang it on anymore. Hannibal has quite thoroughly moved past the portion of his life that overlapped Alana's; so much so that he cannot be bothered even to kill her. What does she need from this?

What does she get out of this?

Chilton, having no horse in the race, is mostly indulging her from sheer, blinding boredom. He rarely leaves the house any longer. His appearance is far too entertaining to idiots now.

If he were to do it...that would be why. They took his life, took away the ability to live, but they didn't kill him. That thought sits all the time like a hot stone in the pit of his stomach. Why had they not just killed him?

 _It would certainly be something_ different, _at least._ Frederick is nearly to the point where learning the mysteries of death might be preferable to listening to Alice snoring across the hall for the next three or four decades.

_How depressing._

 

"Hannibal. Hannibal..."

"Hmm," Hannibal says, sleeping.

"Hannibal...it's so hot...it's so hot in here..."

It is not. Actually, it's slightly too cool. Hannibal rolls over and pulls Will in without opening his eyes, touching his forehead to Will's. No fever. Totally normal body temperature, not sweating, nothing. He pries one eye open to look at Will; he's terrified.  

"I feel so hot," he whimpers, the tears starting in his eyes. They usually accompany his episodes.

"You're safe, Will."

Will says, "Help—" and his voice cracks, he shoves his face to Hannibal's chest and sobs. Hannibal strokes his hair. He wants very badly to go back to sleep and deal with this in the morning, but mental illness keeps no timetable, unless it shows the most inconvenient times to strike.

He has felt it coming the same as Will. Will, characteristically, has not yet brought it up, but he can feel it creeping along the threads of the web of them, shaking the strings. He has allowed it to approach without interference.

He supposes that makes him a bad boyfriend.

Hannibal sees no conflict, personally. He is always in control. He can dangle Will as far down over the edge as he pleases, because he can always pull him back up and set him right again.

He knows what Will needs. Intensive, twice-a-week specialist therapy and antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, probably even an inpatient stay would help him greatly. Will knows it too, but he avoids the subject like the plague and Hannibal suspects he's never been on medication. He was certainly never in regular therapy until he was forced to see Hannibal.

Will had once compared himself to the Monster, Hannibal to Victor Frankenstein. _My creation._ Hannibal squeezes Will tighter, pleased. What this trip needs is a little more shaking up, a little more...unpredictability.

Last night they discussed going home. Will is homesick, afraid, losing faith. He rightly judges that the increased contact with others and the stress of hunting and being hunted is making his mental illness flare. He misses the house by the ocean, the isolation with Hannibal, the peace. Hannibal is a bit disappointed that he has not yet learned to better employ his memory palace, to be at peace anywhere he goes, but as exceptional as Will is, he is still a man.

Not like Hannibal.

After this, they can go home. Whether that home will be the little white house or somewhere with more opportunities for them both, Hannibal has not yet decided. But there are some things to take care of first, things Hannibal had in the back of his mind from the beginning, and he'll need Will at his least inhibited, most dangerous.

_My creation, my monster. Someday, you'll thank me._

 

When Freddie slides open the glass door in the morning, Hannibal is there, barechested in his pajamas, watching the sunrise. Freddie approaches cautiously and takes the opposite seat. Hannibal glances at her, glances back to the horizon.

She senses that she has interrupted something, but she's unwilling to back out and trigger a barrage of questions. Instead she takes a cigarette from her emergency pack, the one she still keeps after quitting nearly a decade ago. A hostage situation feels like a good excuse. She offers one to Hannibal, who accepts. She hopes Newport 100s are good enough for Mr. Well-Developed Palate.

Closely she watches as he bends forward to light it, cupping around it his six-fingered left hand. The pink glow catches in his graying blond hair, creates a red glitter from somewhere. She remembers the rumors that Dr. Hannibal Lecter, as the Devil incarnate, has tell-tale red eyes. He looks at her when he hands the lighter back, and she can see that although the spark in his eye is red, the irises are a dark, rich copper, almost more orange in the brown than red, something like terracotta or chestnut, darkening around the perimeter to deep burgundy. Their uncommon color certainly helps him draw you into that piercing stare.

"Yes, Ms. Lounds?" Oops. She's staring.

"I, uh...was admiring your eyes," she says awkwardly. She decided last night that telling Hannibal the truth as much as possible is probably a good idea.

"I see. Wanted to know if they were really red."

"They aren't. Red-brown. Maybe when they catch the light."

"Yes. They are unusual, I admit." He looks away and blows a thin stream of smoke towards the rising sun. "Every member of my family line had them."

She knows that Hannibal's family is dead.

In the years since the trial very little has come out about Dr. Lecter's background, despite a thorough search and the cooperation of Lithuanian and French authorities. He has always had a penchant for punning pseudonyms, a strategy of covering up his crimes by mimicking the MOs of other murderers, sometimes even framing them, and the general upheaval of the Soviet years has muddied the waters further.

What is known is that his entire family, faded Lithuanian nobility, died when he was a child in the 1970s, no older than eleven. The last living relative found, an aunt by marriage, also passed away, in Japan, just months before the discovery period began. She wonders if he was ever told after this was found out, by his lawyer perhaps, but does not ask.

Odd to think he had a mother, a father, a sister, an aunt. He seems so self-contained, or self-created. But after all, he's only a man, born of woman. He came from somewhere. Once there were others who shared his genetic makeup. Were they anything like him? The precise records of his family's fate were lost in the Soviet blender.

The sister, Mischa, would have been a baby when she died.

"Do you and Will want children?" she asks, somewhat hesitant. She's not sure how far she can go into Will territory without being _rude._

Hannibal looks at her for a long moment.

"Do you?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Married to journalism. No time to give a kid anything good. I would resent dividing my attention."

For a moment Hannibal looks like a cobra about to strike, but he softens. Freddie wonders what awful truth about herself she was just spared from hearing.

"Will is my child," he says simply. "My family, my life. I have nothing for anyone else." He takes an unbearably attractive drag of his cigarette and looks away again.

 _Will is my life._ It's very frank, coming from Hannibal, a man who speaks almost entirely in riddles, to her judgment.

Part of her wishes she could get inside Hannibal's head, figure him out. While she plays a little loose with the truth in _Tattle Crime_ when necessary, Freddie is a real, and _good,_ journalist, and she wants the truth of things even if she doesn't print it. For her own satisfaction. She envies Will a little, although she knows it's foolish. The price of admission is far too rich for Freddie's blood, even if anyone was offering.

"Where is Will? Sleeping?"

"Why don't you find out?"

Freddie doesn't like the sound of it, but she goes. Will is curled up in the bed, apparently sleeping. Upon closer inspection, he's unconscious. She pulls up his eyelid: no reaction.

Instead of going back out to Hannibal, she sits on the bed next to Will with a sinking feeling in her stomach.

 _I guess I kind of thought this would be glamorous._ She hadn't gotten taken intentionally, but she suspects she could have done more to prevent it. Like not coming at all.

Maybe some secret part of her wanted to get captured. She had headed to meet them with vague hopes of a live interview, or maybe just some candid footage, openly or otherwise. She could have dined out on it for the rest of her life. But now she's here by herself, with nothing but her dead iPhone (Hannibal had so far politely pretended not to hear her inquiries about a charger) and a couple grams of weed. It's starting to feel, with her dread of walking past Hannibal on the way back to her room, like the wolves are really at the door.

And she doesn't know how to feel about what's happening to Will. Hannibal rarely instigates things; he tends to whisper the right word in the right ear and sink back for some entertainment. He didn't make Will sick, but he's not doing anything about it. She doesn't trust his tiny syringes and his assurances that Will is fine, this happens all the time.

Once upon a time she had been sure that Will Graham was a murderer. She's known murderers, met them in her work, even another cannibal once. From up close, Will isn't like them. He's killed, but he's not a murderer.

He's not better than them or anything, Freddie doesn't believe in being a "better" person than someone else, but it's his carriage, his easy jokes, his genuine friendliness. He's not hard. He's unbelievably soft, not like the slimy ones, but like...a kind person.

She looks down into his face. His mouth is hanging open a little. She closes it so his tongue won't get dry and tries to figure out what to do.

 

In his dreams Will is in bed, too, but not this bed. It's the white bed in the white bedroom with the white gauze curtains, by the ocean, somewhere isolated and rocky far up the coast. It's sunrise here too. But Hannibal's not here.

He turns his head slowly, feeling drugged, to look at Hannibal's empty pillow.

An incredible wave of relief washes over him, synced up with the sound of the tide outside. _He's dead. He's actually dead. Hannibal is dead._

He remembers himself. _Wait...why am I happy?_

Slowly he turns his head back again and gazes at the lazy ceiling fan, throwing sharp shadows in the pink light, a sight he saw hundreds of times lying here next to Hannibal, not waking up crying anymore, not waking up in a pool of sweat, not even always waking up from nightmares of drowning, anymore. Waking up and watching him sleep.

_Oh, God. How did this happen._

He knows two things absolutely: he loves Hannibal more than anything in the universe, more than his own life—and more than anything, he wants to see Hannibal dead. They are equally strong pulls, as perfectly magnetic as he and Hannibal. He could have just as easily picked one over the other. In fact, he had chosen both.

Now the thin needle-like rain is hitting his face again, cold, and the gust on the sea is nearly knocking him over, with how weak he is from the blood loss and...the _pain._ Will had never felt such pain in his life, not even being shot. Things seem to flicker in front of his eyes.

He registers that he and Hannibal are holding each other, standing on the eroding bluff. It's more intimate than the sex was, almost, the light grasp of Hannibal's trembling hand on his arm. Haltingly he lowers his head to Hannibal's chest and listens to his heart, feeling something in him bursting, hoping the kicked-in-the-ribs feeling is an emotion, not a death knell.

Or does he.

Or does he.

Will is sobbing, in agony, in happiness when their lips touch, and because he knows he won the fight, but he's about to lose the war. He's about to surrender.

_I give up. I love you. But this isn't the world for us. We were never really here. We can't love each other here. In this world, I can't both love you and kill with you. But God, I love you. And I couldn't leave without you, no matter how many times I wanted to. Now I understand. Now I really understand._

Hannibal almost rocks him, or maybe they're both shaking. Every patch of flesh Hannibal makes contact with stings and burns and stabs. It's beautiful.

"Hannibal, I love you," he says. He doesn't look down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uhhhhhhh so I guess shit is getting real, really real at this point. Enjoy?
> 
> stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com


	13. 11 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thinks this is the memory palace, the white house again. But there's a vague sense of foreboding significance that reminds him more of a dream. There's a fire in the fireplace and a storm far out to sea that he can feel rather than see. The living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, all empty. That's everything.
> 
> Will walks out on the porch and the storm is there, far off, a little clump of clouds and lightning on the horizon below the tiniest sliver of a waning moon. He sits down to watch it on the rocking loveseat and nearly jumps out of his skin when he realizes that, in the complete darkness, he missed the person already sitting on it.
> 
> It's a woman he doesn't recognize, at least from squinting by the light of the stars.
> 
> CHAPTER SPECIFIC TWs: discussion of intimate partner abuse

> _Oh, take me, take me to back your bed_  
>  _I love you so much that it hurts my head_  
>  _Say I don't mind you under my skin_  
>  _I let the bad parts in, the bad parts in_
> 
> _Well, when we were made we were set apart_  
>  _But life is a test and I get bad marks_  
>  _Now some saint got the job of writing down my sins_  
>  _And the storm is coming, the storm is coming in_
> 
> _Take me, take me back to your bed_  
>  _I love you so much that it hurts my head_  
>  _I don't mind you under my skin_  
>  _I'll let the bad parts in, the bad parts in_
> 
> _Well, you're my favorite bird and when you sing_  
>  _I really do wish that you'd wear my ring_  
>  _No matter what they say I am still the king_  
>  _Now the storm is coming, the storm is coming in_
> 
> _—Brand New, "Degausser"_

 

When Freddie eventually returns to the balcony, Hannibal is sitting where he was, hands folded in his lap like an old man, not sleeping but reading in the memory palace, although Freddie does not know it. _He looks oddly dignified like that,_ she thinks. _Like the subject of a Victorian mourning portrait._

She sits down and clasps her own hands between her knees, looking out over the desert. So much nothing. _Here's to nothing._ She lights another "emergency" cigarette. She and Alana are feeling a very similar sense of fatality as far as indulging their vices.

"Do you enjoy seeing him that way?" she asks Hannibal, no longer caring how he reacts to her questions. When she was made aware that the polite, fastidious doctor was a murderer and cannibal, she had felt a little chill that came back whenever she spoke with him. But the close quarters are making her fatalistic here too: she can't stop him either way. He can kill her at any time no matter what she says.

Hannibal does not open his eyes. "No," he says, "of course not."

"'Of course not'?"

"I do not enjoy seeing Will suffer."

"Right."

He opens his eyes, and the glitter in them is more amused than threatening. "Physically, perhaps. Perhaps you might say Will and I both enjoy indulging in certain...predilections. But his suffering in the grips of his mental illness does not thrill me."

"Because you're not causing it, _perhaps?"_

"Oh, but I am. My inability to help Will is a lie of omission: I cannot cure him, but I could be helping him by more...conventional means."

"But you do believe you're helping him."

"I _am_ helping him, Ms. Lounds," Hannibal says, smiling like a threat display. "The days in which I concerned myself with trying to end Will Graham's life are past. As I told you, his life is my life. Killing him would be depriving myself of the finest privilege I will ever have in this world."

"Because you love him, Dr. Lecter? Or because you get off on making him miserable?"

"You go too far, Ms. Lounds," Hannibal says, calmly, like an Austen character, as he sips his coffee. "I love Will Graham more than my own soul and skin. He is part of myself. My treatment, however unorthodox, always aims to show Will his own beauty, his potential for radiance. It is unfortunate that to reveal one's perfected self is a painful process."

"And I'm guessing he doesn't get a say in this...treatment."

Hannibal's languid eyes gaze at her over the rim of his mug. He sets it down and says, "I trust Will Graham to be responsible for his own wants and needs. I trust him to be responsible for his own emotions. Perhaps I trust him to stop me if I do something that does not agree with his own agenda, too."

Freddie doesn't know how she feels about that. On the one hand, it _sounds_ good, like a lot of what Hannibal says. It can't be denied that he frequently makes a twisted kind of sense. His means are monstrous, but the premises of his arguments are perfectly sound, if you view people the way Hannibal apparently does. And she does believe him...she believes he loves Will as much as he says. There's simply no other explanation for why Will is still alive.

Hannibal is thinking, for some reason, about Abel Gideon, the many pleasant chats they had over dinner as they slowly consumed his severed limbs together. One reason Gideon had lived as long as he did because he really was quite a good conversationalist. Hannibal had thoroughly enjoyed talking with him as he cooked him out of existence. Keeping him alive was partially a philosophical experiment in autocannibalism, partially due to a shortage of freezer space.

He dearly misses his kitchen in Baltimore. He has lived many places, but his home in Baltimore was his favorite in a lot of ways. The kitchen was perfect. He would like to have a real library again someday, too, not just the one in his head, as exact a replication as it is.

 

_"What do you have planned for Mr. Graham?" Gideon asks, in his perpetually wry way of speaking. "I sense that he may be...different to you."_

_"Different?" Hannibal is cutting a piece of Abel into bite-sized chunks with a fork and knife. He finishes and takes a sip of wine before popping one into his mouth. Gideon watches him chew._

_"Yes,_ different. _Maybe even..._ special? _You said it's only cannibalism when both parties are equal. Would it be cannibalism to eat Mr. Graham?"_

_Hannibal thinks about it. "We are not yet equal, not exactly. But it may be that I see...potential in him, let us say."_

_"Potential beyond becoming a lovely main course."_

_"Exactly." Hannibal thoughtfully tops up Gideon's wineglass. "No offense intended to present company, of course. That type of potential is nothing to be ashamed of either."_

_"None taken," Gideon says dryly._

 

"I think I will get a bit more sleep, Ms. Lounds, if you don't mind," Hannibal says.

"By all means."

"I do hope you won't be too bored," he says thoughtfully. It bothers him not to be a good host when he can. He steps into his and Will's room and produces an iPhone charger which he tosses to Freddie.

"Don't do anything you might regret later, hm?" He winks at her and slides the door closed behind him. Freddie fully expects to hear their headboard banging against their shared wall within the hour.

_Sleep, my ass. All they do is fuck and stab each other. Pervs._

She had forgotten to ask about their next move.

 

Will is still wandering the halls of his mind. In his dreams he dips in and out of his memory palace, and he's beginning to be able to tell the difference between the two. In the memory palace, his own memory palace at least, he has some measure of control. In dreams he's at the mercy of his sick brain.

He thinks this is the memory palace, the white house again. But there's a vague sense of foreboding significance that reminds him more of a dream. There's a fire in the fireplace and a storm far out to sea that he can feel rather than see. The living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, all empty. That's everything.

Will walks out on the porch and the storm is there, far off, a little clump of clouds and lightning on the horizon below the tiniest sliver of a waning moon. He sits down to watch it on the rocking loveseat and nearly jumps out of his skin when he realizes that, in the complete darkness, he missed the person already sitting on it.

It's a woman he doesn't recognize, at least from squinting by the light of the stars. This can't be the memory palace, then. Someone he's never met couldn't be here. At the next lightning strike he looks her over quickly.

She's barefoot, long slender legs crossed; she wears a full-length white cotton nightgown, old-fashioned, with long sleeves and little ruffles running down the bib. Her ash blonde hair is tied up loosely. Will judges she's probably in her late 20s.

The woman looks pensive, chin resting on her fist. She doesn't stop watching the storm, as though she's aware of but uninterested in his presence. It's very reminiscent of Hannibal's uncanny way of knowing, the way he recognizes Will by scent without needing to see him.

"Hello?" Will says cautiously.

"Hello." Her voice is smooth and deep. She has a familiar accent.

"Uh...can I...ask who you are? I don't..."

She turns. Her face is broad, with high cheekbones, and when the lightning strikes, tiny and far off, the flash reflects red in her burgundy eyes. Will stares.

She raises her eyebrows at him in a way that's so exactly like Hannibal that he would laugh if he wasn't so completely flabbergasted.

"What are you... _doing_ here?"

"His getting boring, sometimes. Enjoying yours. Not so crowded. Relaxing." She clears her throat with a delicate noise; Will has the impression that she rarely needs to speak. Her accent is thicker than Hannibal's, her English more choppy.

"But how..."

She shakes her head, one corner of her lips turning up. "Always wanting to know _how_ and _why_ and _when,_ yes, Will? Never going to be happy asking so many questions."

_You'd be much happier if you relaxed with yourself, Will._

"Okay," he says. "I guess I don't need to know. None of this is real, anyway."

"You experience, is real."

 _God, I come here to get_ away _from Hannibal and...wait, no I didn't. I remember going to sleep in the hotel...and then I woke up and it felt like the fever was back...and now I'm...here. What's...going on?_

He sits there beside Mischa and frowns at the storm, which looks closer. Anything like weather in the memory palace that isn't a direct recollection usually reflects some emotion or mental state. Apparently his subconscious is not very creative with its metaphors.

"You..." she struggles a little, "are you having...any cigarettes, please?"

Will starts to say no but then remembers the pack they used to keep in the bedroom drawer. Sure enough, it's there. He brings them back out from the blackness in the house to the blackness outside.

"American Spirits," she chuckles when she sees them, "Is him, all right."

Will has noticed a common tendency to those who know Hannibal: they say _him_ and you always know exactly who they mean.

She lights up and Will does too. He doesn't smoke, and never really has, but sometimes, _before,_ on the way home from a day of lecturing, he'd stop and pick up a pack of Marlboro Reds and a bottle of Wild Turkey and sit on the porch and smoke and drink, not reading, not doing anything but thinking, looking at the woods but not really seeing them. Before Hannibal, there was nothing to see out there.

After Hannibal, he'd sometimes be lost in thought and suddenly start to his feet, rocks glass thumping on the floor and rolling away, asking himself if he could really be seeing what he thought he'd seen. The dogs would lift their heads and growl and he'd think: _There's no way. It's too big. There aren't moose for several states in any direction, and it's too big to be a regular buck or even a horse. It's too big._

He'd sit back down, his heart pounding, the dogs licking the sweet Wild Turkey up off the boards of the porch until all at once they'd start barking in unison and he'd sense rather than see it as it passed the porch. He could never really get a good look, just a glimpse of its black feathered haunches rolling from side to side as it ambled into the darkness outside the circle of light cast by the bulb by the door. He'd see what he thought might be an enormous, deadly rack of antlers, black on the blacker black of the night. But he couldn't be sure.

Those nights he'd pour himself more than a few more glasses of bourbon and sometimes wake sprawled uncomfortably in the couch in the middle of the night, the dogs whining and scratching at the door to be let out.

The silence between them is unexpectedly comfortable as he remembers it.

There are more questions he wishes he could ask her, but he's not sure she could answer them. She's not alive, after all. She can't be the real Mischa. Even if she's some sort of...self-aware construct of Mischa, some vivid memory of Hannibal's sister that gained sentience in the memory palace... _ugh, never mind. She's right, I need to stop asking questions anyway._

"Know what you thinking, Will," she says presently. "Want to know if really he love you." She pronounces it _laahve._

Not exactly, but it is constantly on his mind, so it's close enough. He waits for her to continue.

"He love you. But...is like...asking if _dis_ real. Answer is..."

She searches for the phrase, a crack of lightning momentarily solidifying in the air the smoke scrolling up from her cigarette.

 _"_ _Tam tikru atžvilgiu._ Love you, 'in manner of speaking,'" she decides finally. "But never loving you like others. He cannot do. But am thinking is wanting to...in moments of weakness." She has Hannibal's dry humor, too.

"I don't expect him to love me like anyone else would. I see him. I know."

"Do you? Am thinking are not seeing anymore. Am thinking you having such _fahn_ time _here,"_ gesturing gracefully to the house behind them, "now, put on rose-tinted glasses when looking. Not see him, he not see you...no good. Fall apart." She exhales smoke.

"I guess I don't exactly understand."

"You fight back, Will. Stop, he start getting restless quick. Sometimes, boredom, eeh, make little bit...unpleasant."

This much is true.

"He do not want _passive_. Is wanting to play games. You not playing, he is making up new ones, is playing with _you_ instead. Am not thinking you like."

"But you said he loves me."

Mischa sighs. "Will, is telling me lots of things about you, but never is saying you _stupid._ Of course, he love you. But to him...loving is not being same as not hurting. _Think._ He love you because you seeing him, because you accepting what you see, accept him. But what really he love is _cannot_ be controlling you, cannot, eeh... _ahhnteecipate_...reactions. You not being _unpreedeectabule_ , letting him be pushing you around, like he do everyone else."

"But I haven't been," Will says, puzzled. "I hold my own."

"You are _wanting_ Alana Bloom to die? Wife, child?"

"Of course not. But..."

"But what? But is not your place? But not enough to be stopping?"

"I...told him I wouldn't do it," he says lamely.

She jabs at him with her cigarette, her red eyes flashing in the dark like the red cherry of it. "Are not telling _him_ not to do."

"He wouldn't listen," Will protests. He feels silly defending himself to someone who's been dead for nigh on four decades.

"Must be _making him_ listen," she urges. "You only can do _dis._ See? Hannibal... _he cannot kill._ Trying, and failing, over and over. Why do not _use_?"

He senses her frustration in trying to explain the complex rules of Hannibal's games in her broken English. The wind from the approaching storm whips little blonde tendrils of her hair around her face; she shields her cigarette prettily.

"Let's go inside," Will says.

They sit by the fireplace instead, on the floor. Will traces the patterns in the Oriental rug with one finger. Suddenly he wonders if this means his whiskey is here too and there it is, in its accustomed place. He throws back two fingers and brings the bottle back to the fire.

Mischa tosses her cigarette butt on the fire and lights another, reaches out to take a slug from his bottle like a good Eastern European girl. _How in God's name did she become a smoker?_ Will wonders. _She was a baby when she died._ Will doesn't know why he even bothers questioning things that happen to him anymore. It would seem that for those in Hannibal Lecter's orbit, the laws of reality are suspended.

"Is good to know _dis_ being here," she says, grinning. She's so like and so unlike Hannibal, her fierceness, the easy entitlement and bearing of her noble upbringing much closer to the surface. Does she watch from behind his eyes? Or does she just manifest herself in one place for special occasions like lecturing confused boyfriends? Will pours and knocks back another two fingers of whiskey. He's never gotten drunk in the memory palace before. With his luck he'll wake up with a hangover.

 _"Dis_ what am telling you, Will," she says. "Try to be making plain. My brother, he only is loving you if seeing you as equal. Just shaking, being helpless, he be getting bored of you. Then _really_ he might kill."

"You're right," Will says, resigned.

"Good! Now...you are getting out of here!" she says, playfully, smiling, somehow now clutching his bottle curled against her chest. "Is very good, finally, to be meeting. And please, my brother, keep making _heppy._ Was thinking he never is _heppy_ again."

 

Alana gets the call around 11 AM. Chilton nearly jumps.

"Her phone is on! _Her phone is on!"_ the caller shouts, loud enough for him to hear.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"Dr. Bloom—it's Aaron, Ms. Lounds' cameraman—"

Chilton watches her listening intently, being interrupted every time she opens her mouth. Finally she says, "Okay, okay, listen, _don't_ call anyone. And _do not send anyone._ No! I don't care what she said! Aaron! Okay, yes, I will keep you updated."

She hangs up.

"Well?" Chilton demands.

"That was Freddie Lounds' cameraman. Her phone has been dead since not long after she was taken, but he's been checking Find My iPhone from Freddie's computer once in a while just in case, and her location just came up. She's in New Mexico, near a city called Roy."

"Has he spoken to the police?"

"No." Alana frowns. "He said Ms. Lounds left instructions that in case of an emergency, a _Tattle Crime_ film crew should be dispatched to the scene before any law enforcement was called. Apparently Aaron is not as dumb as he looks, so he decided I would be a good person to call before he did it, since I got her in this mess."

Alana paces and drains her glass.

"I should be the one to report it," she says, thinking out loud. "I can tell them how crucial it is that Hannibal _not have any way of knowing_ that the snare is closing. If there is _anything,_ he will know and they'll be gone, somehow."

"Have you considered that creating a standoff in a hostage situation may result in Ms. Lounds' death?"

Alana gnaws her bottom lip as she paces.

"I see. It is worth more to you that they die than that Ms. Lounds lives."

She paces faster. "I can't go on like this, Frederick," she says, through grit teeth. "I can't live my life knowing he's out there. I can't do it. Even if he made me a solemn promise right this second that he would never touch a hair of my family's heads, I would never, ever have peace. Not until I see his corpse. Their corpses."

Chilton takes a long time arranging and poking at and lighting a bowl in his pipe while Alana continues wearing a loop in his carpet.

"So that is what it is, in the end," he says. "You have caught Dr. Lecter's disease, and you cannot resist the poetic justice of using him and Will to purge it from your system."

"What the fuck does that mean?"

"You want to kill, Dr. Bloom. You got a taste of it at Muskrat Farm, due indirectly to Dr. Lecter. You think the only way to stop your desire for it is to kill the head vampire, so to speak."

"That's ridiculous," she says, unsettled.

"No wonder he has no interest in you anymore," Chilton says to himself, ignoring her response. "He has already gotten from you the only thing he wants from anyone. Their total corruption. The passage of his curse."

Alana throws her rocks glass into the fireplace, where it bursts on the brick. "I am _nothing_ like Hannibal Lecter!"

Chilton looks rather disappointed.

"It is not as satisfying as I had thought it would be, Dr. Bloom," he says. "To be the originator, rather than the object, of pity, for once."

"I'll go myself."

"You are a fool."

"I can sneak up on them better than ten cop cars can."

"Dr. Bloom, for God's sake, go home and sleep it off. You are talking like a maniac."

"No, no, no, I'm doing this. I can't risk the cops fucking this up."

"Is that not exactly what Jack Crawford was saying before that disgraceful fuck-up that left that poor child dead? Was that not exactly the reasoning that led to his departure from the agency?"

"I'm not FBI."

"Exactly. What do you think will happen, Dr. Bloom? He will feel your presence immediately. He knows you by smell, _intimately._ How do you expect to sneak up behind him, exactly?"

"I don't need to," she says. "I don't need to. I just need to sneak up on Will Graham."

 

"Mischa," Will mumbles, when Hannibal curls up along his body, arranging the covers to his liking. He stops.

"What did you say, darling?"

"Mischa...I met Mischa..."

"Will. What do you mean?" He rolls Will over to face him. Will winces at the sunlight in his sleepy eyes.

"I was dreaming," he says, shielding his eyes. "I don't know, I had a dream I met Mischa. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you."

"What did she say to you?"

Will is confused, disoriented as he always is when he wakes. "I...I don't...she said...something about...'things fall apart'...'rose-tinted glasses'...I don't know, it was a dream."

"Tell me everything you can remember."

Will tries to think. "I was home, at the house. There was...a storm...and it was dark and empty, and she was there...she was...not a little girl, she looked maybe 27...she was beautiful. Her hair...her eyes were just like yours."

"Are you absolutely certain it was a dream, Will?"

Will squints at his face. "What else would it have been?"

"Could it have been the memory palace?"

"I guess so, Hannibal, but I don't see how it could be. I don't have any memories of Mischa. And no one has memories of her as...an adult."

"Did she give you a message, Will?"

Will really has no idea what Hannibal is trying to get out of him. He tries to slide down and get the sun out of his eyes.

"She did." He remembers now. He remembers the pointed teeth in her smile.

"What was it?"

"It was...for me."

They look into each other's eyes.

"For you."

"Yes."

"So you will not be sharing it with me."

Will thinks. "Not yet."

Hannibal is burning holes in him. Will doesn't look away.

"It was a dream, Hannibal. I'm sure it was. I just want to...think it over for a while. But she said...she told me," he says softer, "to keep making you happy. She said she thought you'd never be happy again."

Hannibal throws off the covers and starts to get undressed. He turns on the shower.

"We're leaving," he calls back to him. "In an hour." The bathroom door shuts.

Will sighs and sits up unsteadily. It almost does feel like he has a hangover. But it might be more whatever was in Hannibal's needle than imaginary dream bourbon consumed with a dead woman. He gets dressed and finds Freddie with a cup full of cigarette butts beside her, fidgeting with a lighter and staring into space.

"Pack up," he says tonelessly. "We're heading out in an hour."

"'Pack up,' that's a good one."

"Yes, it's all laughs around here."

She puts out her latest butt. "Let's go. While he's in the shower. Let's leave."

Will laughs.

"I don't need to escape, Freddie. You're the hostage."

"Oh, yeah?"

She and Will stare at each other in silence for a beat.

"I don't like that, Freddie," Will says. "I know you're scared. But I don't like the implications you've been making."

"I'm not implying anything. I'm _saying,_ right now, outright, that's he's abusive to you, and he's _dangerous,_ and I want you to leave with me. I want to help you, Will."

Will walks to the railing and folds his arms on it, leans over, looking at nothing.

"Are you telling me you can't admit to that?"

"Freddie. I don't need your help. You're talking about things you do not and cannot understand."

It's her warning. She blows right past it.

"Will, this isn't some grand Catherine-Heathcliff thing. This isn't beautiful and romantic."

"Freddie, go get your shit together now and get ready to leave."

"If you stay, he is going to hurt you, and he is going to kill you, whether it's tomorrow or in twenty years."

 _"Good,"_ Will says loudly, still not looking at her, like he's trying to stay calm. The set of his mouth is hard. "I'd rather _let_ him kill me than betray him again. When I die, whether it's tomorrow or in twenty years or in fifty, I want it to be because Hannibal Lecter kills me."

"Will," she says, uncertain.

"And that is the last fucking opinion I want to hear from you about my relationship with Hannibal. Go get your shit or I'll kill you." His voice is steady. "Do it now."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Huge thanks to [every-bubble](http://tumblr.com/every-bubble) for their assistance with the Lithuanian in this chapter!
> 
> stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com


	14. 12 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes it makes Hannibal feel like a mute again, as he was in his own chrysalis. He whispered to Will's, the Lady Murasaki to his. Something is changing for the first time since the Lady turned away from him, said those words.
> 
> What was left in me? What was left in me to love? Implying, nothing.
> 
> It was a damned lie. She lied.
> 
> CHAPTER SPECIFIC TWs: brief mention of forced pregnancy termination, knife/bloodplay, extended scene of dissociation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter notes at the beginninggggg to tell you this is a special 5,000-word chapter!
> 
> ALSO: This chapter contains a scenario of basically consensual non-consent, a sex act that would normally not be possible to consent to (sex while having a dissociative episode) that was negotiated out and consented to in advance. I experience both panic attacks and dissociation and I believe that it's possible to consent in advance, and the consent is double-checked again in the scene, but if that type of situation is triggering to you maybe just be aware. It's not explicit or meant to be upsetting.
> 
> stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com

> _An ocean of noise_  
>  _When I first heard your voice_  
>  _Ringing like a bell_  
>  _As if I had a choice_  
>  _Oh, well_
> 
> _Left in the morning_  
>  _While you were fast asleep_  
>  _To an ocean of violence_  
>  _And a world of empty streets_
> 
> _You got your reasons_  
>  _And me, I got mine_  
>  _But all the reasons I gave_  
>  _Were just lies to buy_  
>  _Myself some time_
> 
> _An ocean of noise_  
>  _I first heard your voice_  
>  _Now who here among us_  
>  _Still believes in choice?_  
>  _Not I!_
> 
> _No way of knowing_  
>  _What any man will do_  
>  _An ocean of violence_  
>  _between me and you_
> 
> _You got your reasons_  
>  _And me, I got mine_  
>  _But all the reasons I gave_  
>  _Were just lies to buy_  
>  _Myself some time_
> 
> _Come and work it out_  
>  _This time I'll work it out_  
>  _Gonna work it out_  
>  _This time I'll work it out for you_
> 
> _—Arcade Fire, "Ocean of Noise"_

 

Mischa's skin had been smooth and pale, unblemished that Will could see except for the ragged red scar that ran all the way around her neck. He had not thought enough of it in the dream to comment, but now he can't stop seeing it. It reminds him of Abigail. He doesn't want to think of Abigail.

_They must have chopped off her head on a stump, like a little pheasant._

The thought makes his stomach quiver unpleasantly. Maybe Mischa was neither a memory or a dream, but truly a ghost. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing that's ever happened in his life.

Abigail had appeared to him after her death, even before he knew she was dead. Ghost or hallucination, her comforting presence was more solid to him than a lot of things that happened in the long months between when Hannibal left him and the chapel in Palermo. In his remembrance that period is still an undifferentiated mass of identical days, prescription painkillers, the long wait for his body and heart to heal. Hannibal had not intended the precise, surgical gutting to kill him—but it did.

He felt dead. Abigail was more animated, warmer, more alive than he, even times when she just sat beside him and touched his hand and they didn't talk at all. He was lost. Hannibal Lecter's thoughts still ran in his head, the ugliest and most beautiful thoughts in the world, and they so took over his own that he thought he might pine to death, like a Victorian romantic heroine, waste away from love and pain and regret. But he didn't.

Abigail followed him to Florence, and then she took her leave. If Mischa is still around, maybe his daughter is too, somewhere.

There are many reasons he doesn't want to think of Abigail, and among them is that when Will thinks of Abigail, he knows he can never hand Hannibal the opportunity to kill another one of their children. And that takes him even deeper, to think of the one with no name, the one who was never more than an idea, who wasn't theirs together but who Hannibal also felt justified in taking away. And he _really_ doesn't want to think about that.

It isn't that he ever dreamed of having children, beyond a vague notion of someday maybe, if he was different later in his life. Will likes children, and he knows he could give a kid a respectable, if imperfect, upbringing. But he's not comfortable with them, doesn't know how to act around them. They're too honest. He both envies and fears it.

But it's true—once you find the person you love...he very occasionally, very hesitantly, particularly in the first few months of their new life, allowed himself to envision it, let it float up from the depths of his mind like a shameful fantasy.

He didn't make plans for him, think of teaching him to fish, the child he was somehow sure would be a boy. He just liked to envision, privately, himself and Hannibal with a baby, a newborn, to hold together. It ached in the best possible way. He'd see himself and Hannibal on a couch together, resting his back on Hannibal's chest, cradling a child of theirs in his arms, his son, Hannibal's son, Hannibal touching gently their baby's tiny hands. Sometimes he wishes that like other couples they could just irresponsibly leave things to fate.

But it's good that's one temptation they can't give in to. Babies are fine props for sentimental daydreams but in real life, they do eventually become people, people you have to raise. And that was one reason he knew the fantasy could not be reality. He knows he doesn't really want to raise a child with Hannibal. He thinks he _could,_ and he thinks it might not be entirely a bust, either, but the idea scares him. There would be too much at stake, too much exposure.

For example...just for one example, Hannibal is the sole reason they aren't raising a daughter right now. Will isn't sure how anyone could think that might have slipped his mind in a few short years.

And Hannibal is also, therefore, the reason they can never try again. No amount of daydreams will persuade Will away from that conclusion.

Will does not doubt that Hannibal is _capable_ of loving their child, just as much as he himself would. In fact, he knows in his heart Hannibal would love him. And Hannibal can be fiercely protective. But he doesn't trust Hannibal, and he's quietly sure that he never will. Not enough. Hannibal will remain forever unknowable, and he could never put himself or a new human being through the uncharted experience of his whims as a father.

_I was a father to my sister._

_To him...loving is not being same as not hurting._

So there will be no children. Their family will be two, forever. And that's one of the coldest, hardest truths he faced in choosing him, in a fat pack of very cold, very hard truths. Will can live with a love without trust, because he thinks the sacrifice is worth it, but growing up in it is not something he can inflict on someone else.

No one _understands,_ he thinks, suddenly intensely frustrated, wanting to pound his fist on something. The brief taste of normality Freddie had given him yesterday seems bitter now thinking of all the normal things they'll never have. _No one_ understands _that I'm doing this because I want to, for him. I_ knew _there would be sacrifices. I chose to make them. He's making sacrifices to be with me. Why is that invisible? Why does everyone always see_ me _as the victim?_

Will is just about fed up with being the perpetual charity case. Freddie had not bothered to maybe _ask_ him if he wanted to leave, if he needed or wanted an out. Does she think he doesn't know what's going on?

 _This is my life. I've been here this whole time, with him. I went through everything that happened,_ me _and no one else. Does everyone think I'm some poor desperate fool who forgets anything Hannibal does when he smiles at me?_

Another part, the part that doubts everything he thinks and feels and does, asks him if he's _sure._

 _Are you_ sure _you're okay?_

 _Are you_ sure _this is what you want?_

 _Are you_ sure _you don't want to run away?_

 _Are you very_ sure _you're happy?_

"Fuck off," Will growls at the clothes he's folding and packing away. He hopes Hannibal won't just refold them this time, with that stupid, adorable, long-suffering look on his face.

He thinks about Mischa again, Mischa and the ragged red line where her head was separated from her body.

 _How can I be seeing him more?_ he asks her silently. _I'll stop him. I will. I'll nut up and tell him we're not doing it, neither of us. I'll restrain him if I have to. I'll hurt him if I have to. But that doesn't feel like seeing. I think you wanted me to look for another way._

The bathroom door opens and Hannibal beckons him over in a cloud of steam. Will gladly drops the crumpled shirt and his dark thoughts, and lets his eyes wander over Hannibal's body, hoping for a respite from all this heavy bullshit. "Need help with something?"

"I want to wash your hair. If you'd let me."

Hannibal catches his eyes when they finish their long journey back to his face, and Will nods.

In the shower Will closes his eyes under the hot water and lets Hannibal massage the thick suds into his scalp, foam in his curls. He sighs from the pit of his stomach, still caught in the snare of his anger—in truth, his anger at how humiliated he felt when Freddie had dared to pity him. Pity wounds him deeper than anything else.

He thinks about Reba McClane, a phrase she had repeated when he interviewed her, from a conversation with Dolarhyde: _Pity feels like spit on my cheek._

Sometimes he wishes he could have spoken more freely with Reba. Just to feel...understood. Hannibal understands him completely, from the inside out. But sometimes he wants to be understood from the outside in.

He wishes he could have sat with her longer, held her hands and asked her, _Reba, what do I do? You said you drew a freak, and I said you drew a man with a freak on his back. I knew it was true, because I knew just where the freak was, and where I could always find him. And I went back, Reba. I went back to him._

"What is it, darling?" Hannibal asks, hearing the tension in his sigh.

"Hannibal, is this going to turn out okay?" He leaves his _this_ deliberately vague.

"Yes," Hannibal responds, with absolute confidence such as only Hannibal has.

"Really?"

"Don't start questioning me or I'll shampoo your eyes next."

Will tears up a little even without the shampoo. Next thing he knows he's sniffling against Hannibal's chest, clutching him tight. In the black behind his eyelids those _things_ swim, the Lovecraftian shapes and textures that get too real when it's bad, the ones that mean something in his head is shooting out too much or not enough of something.

It's not coming, anymore; it's here now.

"You need a good rest, Will," Hannibal says softly, placing a hand on his head. Will sobs.

"I think so."

"What can I do for you?"

"Just this."

"Easy enough."

"And...we can't kill Alana."

He hadn't meant to bring it up now, like this; he feels awful, like he's being manipulative, then realizes the irony. Hannibal does not miss a beat.

"I know," he says, gently, but also rather matter-of-fact. "You said you wouldn't do it."

Will asks himself if that means what he thinks it does.

"What?"

"I won't kill her without you," Hannibal says patiently, as if this were the most basic, obvious thing in the world, "and you won't kill her. I will not corrupt our sacrament, Will. I will not desecrate the host. Your willing participation is necessary to me now."

Will feels a strange, indecipherable emotion swelling in his chest. He reaches behind himself to turn the water off and they stand there, naked and dripping. Hannibal gently pushes the wet hair from Will's tired eyes, wraps an arm around him and pulls him close.

"Roman Catholics term the round unleavened wafers that become the flesh of Christ inside us _hostia,"_ Hannibal tells him. "Latin for 'sacrificial victim.'" He pauses. "I cannot kill you, Will, despite the persistence of the urge. Not without mortally wounding myself in the process."

"You need a scapegoat," Will says. It begins to make a strange kind of sense.

"I do. As do you. And we must both be there, willingly, to consecrate it. To perform the transubstantiation, from altar bread into _hostia._ You must bless and partake in the slaughter of your scapegoat, and I yours. If I am to unbind Isaac, the angel must first be there to stay my hand."

"Which am I?"

"You are both."

"And who's the ram?"

"You're ruining it," Hannibal groans, mussing Will's wet hair until he pulls away, laughing.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm just so relieved."

"Relieved? I shall never understand you, Will," pulling him mostly by the head out of the shower and into bed, ignoring his squawks of protest, "not if we both live to be centenarians."

"Well, _you'll_ be a hundred. I'll be a youthful ninety-one."

"Hush, darling," pulling at him and kissing him and touching, "hush, you sweet thing..."

"Ahh..." Will exhales softly, "ah...ah, Hannibal..."

It's just the way his hands skim over Will's skin, the way his kisses on Will's neck seem to burn, the way he always feels possessed, in both senses of the word.

Then somehow there's his pocket knife, he's pressing it into Hannibal's hand, Hannibal is drawing it slowly down, diagonally over the right side of his chest, deep enough to bleed freely but nothing serious. Hannibal just touches his lips to it, Will breathing harshly and his cock hard against Hannibal's thigh, when his tongue runs over his nipple and the fresh wound at almost the same time Will cries out louder than he meant to, panting, holding Hannibal's face to it, letting him suck and lick one and the other until his cock is leaking precum and Hannibal is climbing on top of him, pinning him down with his hips and slipping the knife into his hand.

Things hover.

Will touches the point to Hannibal's throat, just under one ear, and traces lightly over to the other side, just enough to let him feel it. He gazes into Hannibal's eyes, calm and steady but for his chest's accelerated rise and fall, brings the point up under his chin.

In his mind's eye Will sees the arterial spray across his own face, sees a faded afterimage of an upward spurt of red blood against black branches against white sky. It confuses him a little. He wonders if it's a memory of something real or of a dream.

"Had I pushed...how far would you have gone to stop me, Will?" Hannibal whispers, not shying away from the blade. "That far?"

"I don't know. If I had to do it, I would have gone with you." That much he knows.

"And what if there's nowhere to go?"

"Then we'll stop existing together. I don't want to have any more experiences you don't get to feel."

Probably just from the intensity of his relief, the surge of emotion—like very light snow, the nicer kind of dissociation is falling over him, the kind that feels like twilight sleep—words come out of their own accord and sometimes they are interesting, curiosities. Will watches them float out. The stinging of the cut has subsided entirely.

"I don't want to ever be here without you again, Hannibal. I couldn't take it."

"I know."

"I almost did it, I almost went without you." Will smiles distantly. He perceives Hannibal's movements as a kind of quiet shuffle in the background of his awareness. His head feels like helium, like a balloon bumping off thoughts it runs into.

Hannibal is considering him. Will can't remember, just now, whether Hannibal knew about that, if he has already told Hannibal this. He can't think, and the only feeling is a non-emotion that reminds him of how the wind boxes your eardrums when you drive on the highway with the windows rolled down.

"It feels so empty," he says, half to himself.

"Come back, Will," Hannibal says softly. He has a very odd look on his face, but it may be the derealization.

"I can't feel you."

Very far away, pressure in some part of his body. Hand. Hannibal is squeezing his hand, trying to restore his connection to his physical self. It's comforting to know he's there, but when he tries to squeeze back, his own hand remains limp and unresponsive.

_It doesn't matter. Not really._

It still feels like he's floating, but downward now, towards a bottom, like sinking tortuously slow into a pit of quicksand. He's becoming aware of the feeling of paralysis in his chest, he's not sure if this is how his breath is supposed to sound. Over Hannibal's shoulder, a random corner of the room catches his eye, no longer three-dimensional, but a kind of abstract colorblock painting in tones of orange and yellow and white, the strange static-like pattern of the shadows cast by the stucco adding textural interest. Nothingness creeps inward from the edges of his vision like an iris wipe. He's tired.

_I want to let go. He told me it's safe. I can let go. He'll take the next watch._

Hannibal is saying something, whispering in his ear. He replays the sounds of it in his head several times until his brain can catch up: "Your name is Will Graham."

_Well, I know that. I mean, probably. But who is Will Graham anyway?_

Will Graham...he's not sure who Will Graham is or what he's like anymore, or even who he once was. His recollection is that Will mostly liked drinking, fishing, dogs, and being left alone. In fact, his primary goal was to _avoid_ being seen in the way Hannibal sees him, as much as humanly possible.

What kind of life did he live in Wolf Trap, in his house alone, before all this? What was he so desperate to protect from outside invasion? He doesn't remember anymore. There must have been something worth having.

Or maybe it was just tolerable, bland but painless, and that's all he'd thought there'd ever be for him.

He's sitting on his porch in Wolf Trap, the cicadas are keening in the warm darkness, _where are the dogs? No, wait a minute—_

"We're in New Mexico. It's Wednesday. We got here last night."

He's not in Wolf Trap at all. It's hot—he's in Sugarloaf Key. Molly is getting another beer out of the cooler. _Good girl,_ he thinks, in appreciation of both the extra can she's grabbing for him and her round ass in those shorts.

"I am going to destroy you later, woman," he growls, pulling her down across his lap. She laughs and bats at him.

"Will! Don't make me dump sand in your beer when you're not looking."

"Shut up, you wouldn't dare." He rolls her over and kisses her, then reveals a handful of wet sand that he pretends to be about to rub in her hair. She squeals and wrestles with him to stay away from it.

"Stooop ittt," she whines, giggling like she's being tickled, playing it up for him, the oh-no-what-shall-I-do routine. He loves it when she does that, _loves_ it—he grabs her under his body and kisses her good this time, for real, his sandy fingers creeping up under her T-shirt to cup her breast, his other arm loops around her nice solid waist, the soft warm flesh of her back, she moans when he pinches her nipple, they could do it right here, no one on the beach this time of night—

 _"Ouch,_ Will!" A hiss to it saying _that really hurts._

He realizes he's biting her, hard, in the spot where her neck and shoulder meet. Confused, guilty, he stops immediately, pulls away. Suddenly he's cold and sweaty instead of hot and sweaty.

He wants to say he didn't realize he was even doing it, but that's worse somehow. Crazy. Maybe frightening. Maybe dangerous.

"Hey, I'm...sorry. I'm sorry, babe, I..."

"It's—fine."

It's not. Will looks stupidly at the purple ring the bite is becoming, the blood welling in one or two of the indentations. He can't stop looking at it.

"I think...I heard Walter," Molly says vaguely. She gets up and trudges back across the beach towards the house.

Alone now in the warm sandy hollow created by their bodies, Will doesn't know what to do or think. Something incredibly portentous seems to have happened. He's nauseous, scared of himself, afraid to go back to the house.

"What happened to me?" he asks aloud.

"Nothing, Will. You're safe. Today is August 31st, 2016. Do you know where we are?"

"Where's Abigail? Is she okay?"

He can't interpret the pause: "Yes."

"Oh, good, good."

"Do you need anything I can give you, Will?"

"I don't know," he says honestly.

"The lorazepam?"

"No."

"Just rest, then."

Hannibal is moving and it makes the bed move. It becomes dark, suddenly, and the bed moves again when he returns, presses his lips to Will's forehead, pulls the blanket around them.

Hannibal is warm. It's good, being held: securely, soft things around him, in the blessedly stimulation-free darkness. The shaking is not so bad now. Hannibal's body against Will's _feels_ solid and real, at least, even though he can't yet convince himself anything is really real. Either way he clings to him, and feels safe. Paradoxically, feeling safe scares him in his hazy, confused state of mind.

_Am I safe? Is this safe? Is it okay?_

_I don't care. I love him. I need him right now, I need him, I don't care about anything anymore. He's here and I need him._

"Stay," faintly.

"Of course, Will."

In the darkness, Hannibal ponders and regroups, holding Will tighter when he shudders. Another one this soon is unusual.

Less than twelve hours ago, he had been pleased by Will's deteriorating hold on reality. Maybe he was nostalgic for the way things were, when he could toy with Will at no real risk to himself, get away with such things as allowing Will's encephalitis to run unchecked for his own amusement and convenience. And to feed on him, of course, feed on the emotional repercussions, Will's panic and self-doubt and pain.

He had found that Will's pain, like all his feelings, was particularly potent in comparison to others'. It intoxicated him. For the first time he occasionally felt sated, did not feel the need to relentlessly push harder, dig deeper until he hit raw flesh. He felt he could be still without boredom.

That was long, long before he ever shared a bed with Will, killed with him, made love to him, felt him shivering helplessly against his chest like a child who climbs into his parents' bed after waking from a nightmare, felt him needing him and him only, needing something from him only Hannibal could give.

He had thought, back then, that to keep Will needing him he would have to continually prune his contact with others, take away everyone else. It had always been like that when there was someone he particularly wanted to keep hold of; usually in a much more casual manner, of course.

It's difficult to admit, but he drastically overshot with Will. At the time he could not make sense of him, could not conceive of him staying freely, and it brought irresistible urges to do anything necessary to secure his hold, even through means that were unusually reckless, attracted attention, could and nearly did bring his end.

In retrospect, he sees clearly that he went to such lengths because he was already fostering an unacknowledged fear of losing Will. He needed to keep Will in his life somehow. He had never felt such a thing before, and he let it confuse him, get the best of him, make him careless. The night he carved the smile into Will's guts, he accused Will of trying to take his freedom. In truth, Will already had it.

Hannibal had given it to him, willingly, when he let him see. To be offered his freedom back with that last-minute phone call frightened him badly, because it meant he had allowed himself to get so wrapped up in Will he hadn't even realized it was gone.

Lashing out in the unfamiliar agony of his heartbreak and dashed hopes, he'd made it so that he'd never be free again, leaving behind a bloodbath in Baltimore that meant he'd be a wanted man for the rest of his life. Long before he actually surrendered to the FBI, he had already given everything he had to Will. By that point the hospital was as good a place as any to sit and wait to see what Will would do with him—he had nothing left.

All of this seems so tedious, suddenly, in the face of those facts. He had thrown everything away for Will, given up permanently a very comfortable and impressive life to focus on Will alone, and right now he is using their precious time on earth together to babysit a reporter and keep Will pickled in intravenous liquid Ativan, all for the privilege of living out of stolen cars and nightmarish motels. This situation is not doing them justice.

There must be another way, a way that they can live in peace and satisfy their bloodlust at the same time. The taking of the Robinsons had been glorious, deeply affecting, nearly perfect—in contrast, the other deaths have been dull and impersonal, he has not revisited them much if at all. Causing them with Will was of course lovely, but he does miss the neat checks-and-balances system he had in place in Baltimore, each card in his Rolodox another little personal three-part triumph: remove an obnoxious person from the world, avenge whatever insult they had dealt him, and then spend hours in his beloved kitchen.

Without those elements, it is only Will's presence that makes it worthwhile. It is by no means a disparaging statement. His murders as an individual had been very satisfying, but killing with Will is priceless ecstasy.

But only when Will wants to do it. When he's moved to. As with the Robinsons.

That's it, the thing he has known but not been able to lay his finger on.

Hannibal has been allowing Will to worsen, even while now understanding that it must cause him equal pain, because he has assumed that less inhibition in Will would lead to more deaths as gripping as those of the Robinsons had been. Hannibal sees now he has been barking up the wrong tree. When he killed them, those five unsuspecting human beings he had picked utterly at random, Will was transferring to them his desire to kill Molly.

He needs a reason, a drive, to release it, a feeling. That's what makes him capable of it. He killed Dolarhyde for love, on the high of it, and the Robinsons in the riot of emotions brought on by visiting Molly. That is why this brute force method of bringing it out is not working as expected, just draining Will's vital ability to empathize. That's why the other deaths had been...so sanitary, so colorless. Without Will's ability to feel for Hannibal to feel through, without any of the old rewards, it no longer fulfills his need.

The point is not death. The point has never been death. The point is power, the point is control, the point is crushing into the dirt. To crush weakness. To crush weakness in oneself.

He should have seen it much earlier. Hannibal smiles in the dark. While he is disappointed that he did not, he does love things to work out so neatly, and working out things about Will gives him significant pleasure.

In addition, it fits in so neatly with the one last errand on his list, now that Alana has been crossed off.

"My darling boy," he whispers to Will, who is half asleep, breathing calmly now.

Will makes a small noise, presses tighter to him and Hannibal kisses his brow again, his sweet curls, his cheekbone and ear. He has Will's explicit permission to fuck him while he's like this, out to lunch. He, Will, likes it: after the worst of the thing passes, touch and pressure help restore his connection to his physical body and sensations.

"And obviously...it's a good association, to help remind me of things," he had said.

"Of where you are?"

"Of where _you_ are."

He had kissed him then like he kisses him now, tender and lingering, until Will begins to respond in kind, to lift his head to meet Hannibal's lips. Little by little his touch raises Will from the dead, until Will's hands are responding too, his hips, his cock.

"Will, do you know where we are right now?" he says, huffing, forcing himself to stop for a moment. Will sighs and rolls his eyes, impatient.

"Yes. New Mexico. I think you said it's Wednesday? I probably didn't know that before anyway."

"Good," Hannibal kisses him, "good."

"I agree. I prefer the present. My involuntary excursions to the past are not much _fun, mmm..._ Hannibal... _"_

"So you...want this," stroking down the outside of his thigh, drawing it up to his hips, pulling Will's in toward his.

"Yes, yes," Will gasps, grabbing for him. "I'm here, I'm here, dammit." He moves like gravity is weighing heavy on him, but he moves only to bring Hannibal closer to and then into him, and he whispers Hannibal's name hoarsely and Hannibal feels such love for him...

He really does make love to him sometimes, as much as he can. Sometimes it makes him feel like a mute again, as he was in his own chrysalis. He whispered to Will's, the Lady Murasaki to his. Something is changing for the first time since the Lady turned away from him, said those words.

_What was left in me? What was left in me to love? Implying, nothing._

_It was a damned lie. She lied._

He doesn't understand it. He has assumed from the age of 18 that she must be right, that if anyone could know it must be her. She was the only anchor of his young adulthood, the only family he had. If there was anything in him still to love, any shred, shouldn't she have seen it? Loving her alone was not enough to evidence it, and killing for her she would not abide either. Therefore he had nothing to offer her.

He had an out-of-body experience that day on the houseboat. His only memory of the incident, of anything for at least an hour after she said the words, looks down a dark metal hallway. There, more than three decades ago, framed in the arch he's on his hands and knees over the corpse, tall and teenage lithe, up to his elbows all blood, face coated in scarlet gore, ripping away strips of face and chest and neck, tooth and nail like a hyena, wolfing them back unchewed, that vile thing, Vladis Grutas. Meat flooded with adrenaline. Suffering in his own place.

He puts it away.

There are things Hannibal Lecter cannot casually revisit, any more than Will can easily look at his own troubling memories. Never before or since has he consumed prey like that, like a dumb beast. It was if, in saying there was nothing left, she had made it so.

But there must be something. There must be something left, even if she couldn't see it, because Will does. Will sees it just fine. And he loves it, what's left of him.

He looks right at it and loves it.

Will's legs wrapped around his hips, his mouth everywhere on his face, gripping his ass with both hands to thrust into him, his lover's soft cries of pleasure...this is what he needs, what Will needs from him, and they can do this anywhere.


	15. 13 Badlands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "One day in November of '57, Charlie kidnapped and murdered a gas station attendant. Wouldn't give him any more credit, I think. He believed his first murder fundamentally changed him, elevated him above right and wrong." He pauses. "Then it was Caril Ann's parents and baby sister. And when he ran, Caril Ann went with him."
> 
> "They incriminated each other, as I recall."
> 
> "Yes. Starkweather got the chair. He changed his story and claimed Caril Ann was just as guilty as he was. That if he fried, she should be sitting on his lap."
> 
> "After Charlie killed her family, did she think she had no choice but to go with him?" Hannibal muses. "To kill with him? Or did she crave the excitement, the power? Did the rush of holding life and death in her hands bond her to Charlie, someone who had felt it too?"
> 
> Will stares out the window.
> 
> "She was only thirteen."

> _Sometimes you get so lonely_  
>  _Sometimes you get nowhere_  
>  _I've lived all over the world_  
>  _I've left every place_
> 
> _Please be mine_  
>  _Share my life_  
>  _Stay with me_  
>  _Be my wife_
> 
> _Sometimes you get so lonely_  
>  _Sometimes you get nowhere_  
>  _I've lived all over the world_  
>  _I've lived everywhere_
> 
> _Please be mine_  
>  _Share my life_  
>  _Stay with me_  
>  _Be my wife_
> 
> _Sometimes you get so lonely_
> 
> _—David Bowie, "Be My Wife"_

 

Freddie Lounds looks at her phone, checking the time.

Two hours have passed since Will Graham threatened to kill her on the balcony, for the crime of suggesting that Hannibal Lecter may be slightly less than Will's knight in shining armor. Her life has been threatened over more innocent statements, but not many.

Still no service, no wifi. Of course Hannibal wouldn't mind giving her her phone. At the moment it's little more than a toy to keep her busy.

She opens the Notes app and writes:

_August 31, 2016_

_It's Wednesday._

_I am in deep shit this time._

She tosses it at a pillow, annoyed. A little at herself, a lot at Will and Hannibal.

Why can't they be the typical narcissistic organized serial killers? Bundy would have eaten this up. Hannibal and Will don't seem to care at all. She hasn't heard either of them so much as mention their current state of popularity.

She retrieves the phone and begins typing again.

_Notes/observations:_

_Will Graham is taller than I remember him being._

_They both smell amazing, considering they live in a car and fuck constantly._

Great. Very useful. Her stomach growls loudly and she sighs.

It's after noon and she hasn't eaten anything since yesterday. If the hotel doesn't have wifi, she doubts they have room service. She paws through her purse and amasses a handful of change, intending to hunt through the halls for a vending machine. No intention of asking them for whatever they've been eating.

In the hallway Freddie pauses in front of Will and Hannibal's door and puts her ear as close to it as she can without actually touching it. Silence. The TVs blaring through the paper-thin walls of the other rooms along the hall make the lack of noise inside their room more obvious by contrast.

_What is this? I thought we were getting ready to leave._

Maybe Hannibal decided he wanted that nap after all. One of them mentioned they'd been mostly sleeping days before yesterday and they're still a bit out of sync. They've certainly been moody enough.

It sounds nice, a midday nap with your hot boyfriend.

She imagines curling up with Hannibal in bed, in the dark, the heat of his body against hers under the blankets, feeling him kiss her without seeing, his hands on her, six fingers running over the curve of her hip, drawing her in against his chest...

She still wants it, and she's been wrestling with that too. This whole thing is turning out to be quite emotionally exhausting. Will and Hannibal are so strange together, in their new incarnations: they both act like there's some secret between them that Freddie can't know.

_What is it, I wonder._

Her phone rings. Freddie starts: there must be just enough service in the hall. She feels a spark of hope.

It's Dr. Bloom. She hopes she's calling to tell her the SWAT team is on its way.

"Hello? Dr. Bloom?"

"Are you alone?"

"Yes, yes."

Freddie moves away down the hall from Will and Hannibal's door. Alana is hard to hear; the signal is barely there and the call will probably drop at any moment. Freddie clutches her phone to her ear like she can physically keep hold of the weak signal.

"I'm driving to BWI now, I need you to find a way to keep them at the hotel for four more hours."

"What the fuck? Are you crazy? I told you I'd pass on your message but I never—how do you know where I am? Are the cops coming?"

"Calm down, listen, the less you know—"

"You know I can't _make_ them do jack shit, Alana, they're fucking—"

"I don't care what you have to do, just _keep them there!"_ Dr. Bloom sounds hysterical.

"What are you _talking_ about?" Freddie asks helplessly. "Get the fucking feds over here and save my life, for Christ's sake! _I am the hostage of two serial killers!"_ she whisper-screams.

"I can't talk, I'm driving. Four hours."

Alana hangs up on her.

Freddie tries to call back, but her phone is uncooperative and she shakes her fists in a silent fit of rage.

_Wait. Oh my God, isn't there..._

Back in the room, Freddie sits with her hand on the phone for a moment, in disbelief, wondering when she got so stupid, and how Hannibal had known she would completely overlook the landline like a piece of kitschy sculpture. Then she calls the cops.

The local dispatch stays on the line with Freddie while they send the cars and work on getting the federal investigation team. Of course, when the door is broken down, Will and Hannibal's room is empty, and spotless. The sheets are cold. They've been gone for some time.

Very generous tip on the bed, too, more than Freddie would have left for a motel with no wifi.

 

"Are we there yet?" Will asks idly, only half-joking, toying with an empty shot bottle.

"No, darling, my dearest. We have one more stop."

Will indicates the sun in the rearview. "Heading east, I see."

"I've always said you were intelligent, Will."

"And I've always appreciated your vote of confidence."

Will bends down to dig through the plastic bag on the floor for a new shot bottle. He's too happy at the moment to try to pin Hannibal down to a real answer.

In the end they had simply cut their losses and quietly left the motel without attracting Freddie's attention, and somehow it had been as simple as that to get rid of her. They simply tied her leash to a tree and drove away. Almost too easy, a little anxiety-inducing, but on the balance, a huge relief.

Will feels like he can breathe again, without the ambiguously shifting weight of Freddie's life on his shoulders. Her presence put him in the awkward position of potentially defending her life while trying to resist the urge to take it himself. Her journalism had been getting a little too investigative.

"Soon we shall be home again," Hannibal says, as if he is talking to himself. Will smiles and continues rummaging.

"You don't know how glad I am about that fact, Dr. Lecter."

Will isn't going to grill him right now, but he does wonder what Hannibal has in mind between now and then. It has to be something Hannibal is particularly interested in doing while still "at large," or they could just do it after they got home. So something...or someone...back east...but not Alana.

The only person he can think of is Dr. Bedelia DuMaurier, late of Baltimore. Will is sure she doesn't live there any longer. She'll have retreated, slightly, enough to provide herself the illusion of safety. Maybe New York: safety in numbers.

In New York Dr. DuMaurier could be both celebrated and a relative recluse. If not there, another big city on the East Coast. She'll be somewhere cashing in on her sob story—Will has not caught her being interviewed on any of the glimpses of live news he's seen lately, in the hotel or in convenience stores or bars, but he's certain he's heard her name scraping over his ears on the airwaves somewhere in the past week.

 _Could I kill Bedelia?_ Will asks himself. The answer, immediately: _Oh, definitely. If we're killing people, I mean._

If that's the compromise Hannibal has in mind, he'll take it.

They took a new car from the motel parking lot and switched that one out at the next opportunity, with plans to switch again if possible after they cross the next state line. That's looking unlikely now. Even on back roads, barely more than tire tracks in the desert, they keep seeing cops, lazy apathetic cops and twitchy scared younger ones, not many patrolling but lots clustered with their cars around the bars and gas stations they pass. Will watches them out the window, slumped down with his feet up again, working on a nice warm whiskey daydrunk.

"Do you think they'll get us?" he asks, after an hour or so of relatively comfortable silence.

"I shouldn't think so."

"But it's a possibility?"

"And always will be. A necessary aspect of our lives together. You must eventually accept that, Will."

"I assume that means _you_ have accepted it."

"I have been _other_ for far longer than yourself, Will. I have conducted myself with an eye to a situation like this one, as one possible consequence of my actions, since I was only a medical student. A few years before that, actually," he corrects himself.

It always amazes and disturbs Will when Hannibal forgets exactly how many people he's killed, and when and where.

 _"To live outside the law you must be honest,"_ Will quotes, slurring very little.

"So Mr. Dylan would have us believe."

"Honest with yourself."

"Well, it does help. Something on your mind, Will?"

Will's eyes in the rearview are bloodshot and weary.

"Just wish we could stop at one of these damn bars, like anybody else. Make out in a corner, get drunk and fool around. And then go home and stop fooling around."

Hannibal smiles. "If only."

"I want to live somewhere where I can take you out."

"How very romantic, Will."

"I'm serious."

"I know you are. I've never seen you more serious."

"I'm very serious. You never are."

"I certainly am. Often, in fact."

"This is serious to me," Will mutters to the glass, fogging it with hot whiskey breath. Hannibal hears him but doesn't answer.

 

_"I don't want to do anything...I don't know..."_

_"Dramatic? Gay?"_

_"Don't you start that," grabbing at Hannibal, who slips out of his hands and returns, incredibly, with a steel bucket and a bottle of..._

_"Champagne?"_

_"Forgive me for assuming we might, some day, somehow, have a cause for celebration, Will."_

_They drink it on the back porch in the dark, looking at the moon, naked under blankets. Will had never dreamed about marrying Hannibal Lecter on a small, splintery whitewash deck overcrowded by second-hand plastic furniture._

Marry when June roses grow, over land and sea you'll go.

_"I wish we had sparklers," Will says, thinking about summer things._

_"There are fireflies."_

_There are._

_"Give me your hand."_

_Will takes a deep breath first. Then he gives Hannibal his hand._

_"I, Hannibal Lecter...take thee—"_

_"No, I don't like it. Make something up."_

_Hannibal looks at him in the moonlight and the glow of the citronella candles._

_"You first."_

_Will makes a face. "Give me your hand, then."_

_He holds it and rubs his thumb over Hannibal's palm, thinking._

_"I promise you," he starts, and stops. "I promise...that...I..." He wants something that could sum them up, but that seems like a tall order. "I promise to love you."_

_"Don't promise that, Will."_

_"Why not? I love you."_

_"You can't promise me something that isn't yours to give. No man alive can know he'll always love someone."_

_"Yes he can. You'll always love your sister. I'll always love...the ones I've lost."_

_"We are alive, Will. While one lives, nothing is sure."_

_Will doesn't like it._

_"This is unlucky."_

_Far off, discordant:_ Time is luck.

_Will can always hear the ocean, sitting out here._

_"Start over."_

_Will closes his eyes. In the black he sees a man transformed into a firefly, floating underground. He opens them again._

_"Hannibal Lecter, I promise you that, right now, I love you. I promise...to love you as well as I can, as long as I can. Til death do us part." Will draws a breath, shaky. "I promise that...I will...try. Always. At the very least, I will try. I promise. Do you...?"_

_"I do," Hannibal says, and Will swallows and slides the ring on Hannibal's third finger. He holds it for a moment, not sure what to do, and gives Hannibal his own hand again instead._

_"Will..." Hannibal sips champagne and looks down, unconvincingly casual. "I do not promise lightly. But I make your promise, to try. And I swear to you now, that you are mine, and I yours. Love I can promise no more securely than any man. But I swear that while I live, our fates will be intertwined, always."_

_Will does not cry, but he blinks a little faster than usual._

_"Do you take me, Will?"_

_"I do."_

_"And the twain shall be one flesh: so then they are no more twain, but one flesh," Hannibal says quietly. "What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder."_

_Hannibal leans forward as he puts the ring on, and kisses the groom._

 

They have made efforts to keep their marriage from the press: Hannibal even conceded to an apologetic request from Will that they remove their wedding bands for their _Tattle Crime_ pictures. It's a shame. Originally, this trip was intended to be both far more low-key and far more romantic, a honeymoon. It was supposed to be for them.

The wedding was, of course, not legally valid, but they exchanged rings and consider themselves joined in every way that matters. As far as Hannibal is concerned, their marriage is more binding than many. He and Will have killed together—their fates can never be separated again, at least in the eyes of the federal government. They are married by their shared guilt.

He thinks of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, how Bonnie wanted only to share a grave with her sweetheart when the inevitable happened, and how even that was denied her. Lovers who happen also to be criminals are not afforded much comfort in this world.

"You ever heard of Charlie Starkweather?"

"Yes," Hannibal says.

"Do you remember the girl, the little girl? Fugate?"

"Caril Ann."

"Used to be my job, to know all that shit. All the serial killers, like a hall of fame." Will unsticks his face from the window and slumps backward instead with a sigh. "Ms. Lounds promoted us to their ranks, I guess."

Hannibal waits, sensing that Will is making something of these pieces and will continue after he finds the last elusive shot bottle.

Unscrewing the tiny tin cap: "Little Caril Ann of Lincoln, Nebraska, was just thirteen when she met Charlie. He was five years her senior, aimless, a high school dropout. He was strange, awkward, easily provoked. Bullied all his life for his bowlegs and speech impediment."

Hannibal listens, driving.

"One day in November of '57, Charlie kidnapped and murdered a gas station attendant. Wouldn't give him any more credit, I think. He believed his first murder fundamentally changed him, elevated him above right and wrong." He pauses. "Then it was Caril Ann's parents and baby sister. And when he ran, Caril Ann went with him."

"They incriminated each other, as I recall."

"Yes. Starkweather got the chair. He changed his story and claimed Caril Ann was just as guilty as he was. That if he fried, she should be sitting on his lap."

"After Charlie killed her family, did she think she had no choice but to go with him?" Hannibal muses. "To kill with him? Or did she crave the excitement, the power? Did the rush of holding life and death in her hands bond her to Charlie, someone who had felt it too?"

Will stares out the window.

"She was only thirteen."

 

Freddie rushes through as much procedure as she can but the red tape crawls by. She's desperate to start setting up interviews, not to mention eat and _think._

"Ms. Lounds, if you'll indulge us one more time...you told us you didn't know where they were."

"I didn't. Until I found them."

"But you knew where to look."

Freddie sighs deeply. Her new fed friends are determined to look useful this time.

"I have no connection to them now," she explains again. "They communicated to me via burner phones destroyed every day. With no deal, they just won't make contact again."

The investigator looks very tired. "Great. Fine. How did they know to leave hours before you called us?"

"I don't know."

"Why didn't you call before you did?"

"It was the first time I was out of their sight," Freddie lies.

"But you waited hours past the time you allegedly believed Lecter to be sleeping."

"As I said, I thought we were leaving any minute."

"What convinced you to pick up the phone?"

"Dr. Bloom. I was afraid she was putting both of us in danger."

"She was. Do you have any idea _why_ Dr. Bloom is acting like this?"

They had caught Dr. Bloom when she touched down in New Mexico, and quickly found it necessary to sedate her before much information could be obtained. Freddie is not sure how to explain it, and doesn't quite understand herself.

"She has history with them. She may have become...upset, by all this. Let me speak to her. We're close." Freddie gives her first genuine fake smile, seeing the opening. "I'll find out what's going on. Get her wife's number."

 

Alana sleeps in another holding room, legs crossed and her coat draped over her body like a blanket. She stirs when the door opens and says groggily, "Freddie..."

"See? Friends. Now, please, the woman has had a shock," Freddie says to her escort, and shoos the suspicious local cop into the hall. The station is still in a state of general chaos.

Alana doesn't react. Freddie sits in the empty chair beside her and pats her knee encouragingly.

"How are you holding up, Dr. Bloom?"

Alana clears her throat; her voice sounds dry. "I don't fall for the voice-for-the-voiceless act, Freddie."

"Of course not. You're always a step ahead, aren't you, Dr. Bloom?"

Alana says nothing and stares at unpleasant stain-hiding pattern on the carpet.

 _"Tattle Crime_ will put you up somewhere nicer, in exchange for a little chat. Off the record, I swear."

"I couldn't leave if I wanted to. They're about to take me in again. Lots of questions still to answer." Alana sighs.

"Need me to call anyone? Your wife?"

"No. No. Call...this number." Alana tears off an uncrowded page from the ancient magazines on the central table and Freddie finds her a pen from her purse.

"Who is this?"

"Dr. Frederick Chilton."

"Chilton? Why? Is he involved in this?"

"What? No. I mean, just call him. He can contact Margot."

Freddie surveys her critically but Alana doesn't crack.

"Fine. Where does Margot think you are?"

"At...work..." She presses her fingertips into her temples.

"Uh-huh."

"Just, for now, call Frederick and tell him what's happened."

"Sure. And you let me know if you need a place to sleep tonight. If you find that you do, and you decide to have a drink with me before you turn in, I may have some information you'll want to hear. In the course of friendly conversation, of course. Everyone contributing."

Freddie can see her wanting to know.

"I'll think about it."

"Good enough for me." She takes the number from Alana and goes to look for a private place to reconnect with Frederick Chilton.

 

_"We're married now."_

_"I remember, darling. It was only a few hours ago."_

_"I just haven't wrapped my head around it yet."_

_Will is playing with Hannibal's ring, twisting it on his finger, laying bare against him in the sheets, in the moonlight, after fucking, the lovely cool white bed that Will loves so dearly, that is somehow the perfect combination of their domestic styles, minimal and unobtrusive, the down comforter and the pillowcases all white. It makes Will feel like a bride, which is a funny feeling, alright. Maybe Hannibal feels that way too._

_Hannibal watches Will play with the gold band, always watching him, but Will can't bring himself to mind it very much. When you've starved yourself of painful closeness for the sake of some peace all your life, pleasurable attention, even obsession, is like a beautiful opiate drug, and it's very difficult to refuse once you've had a taste._

_"It's a lovely ring," Hannibal says. "Did you choose it? Or the little woman."_

_Will barely resists an irritated eye roll at Hannibal's consistently poor grasp of boundaries. "I did."_

_"You have good taste, Will."_

_"Thanks."_

_"I mean it sincerely. I did not expect ever to wear a wedding band, but if I am to wear one, I'd rather it be this one...yours."_

_"Stop talking like that, you're embarrassing yourself."_

_"I am embarrassing_ you."

_"Well, stop it, anyway." He kisses Hannibal's wedding band. Hannibal draws him in closer to his chest, their faces closer._

_"Let's not tell them."_

_"Who?"_

_"Anyone."_

_"Why not?"_

_Hannibal appears to think. "I enjoy the privacy. It is ours. And no one else's."_

_"But I don't want to call you my boyfriend, or God forbid, my_ lover _for the rest of my life."_

_"What would you rather?"_

_"My..." Will whispers against his lips, "my husband, I suppose."_

_"Doctor and Mister...Lecter? Graham? What do you prefer? I may not take your advice."_

_"No, none of that. You have your name, I have mine."_

_"Afraid you'll get lost?"_

_"As if I wasn't already."_

_Hannibal tilts his chin up a miniscule amount so their lips make contact and they kiss._

_"Now what would you like to do, my darling? We've already opened the champagne. Shall we go back outside to the dark sand and I'll carry you in over the threshold, so we can have a proper wedding night?"_

_"Hannibal," Will says, but he's grinning._

_"I haven't presented the ring to you on bended knee yet. I_ could _carry you, if you like. I've done it before."_

 _"Why am I the bride? And you're too old to carry me, you'll hurt yourself." Hannibal's age is one of the few things he prefers to not discuss, Will's vain_ husband.

 _"I will_ not," _Hannibal says, scooping Will beneath him, enclosed in his arms with Hannibal's weight on him. Will is still smiling slyly. With his hair getting long, that graying blonde, hanging now around Will's face, his pointed eyeteeth, Hannibal is distinctly wolfish these days, and Will likes the way Hannibal's hair skims his stubble, the peek of his teeth through his half-smile._

_"Yes you will. Look at you. At your age, you probably can't even fuck me again yet."_

_"Perhaps I won't try."_

_"Perhaps I don't want you to."_

_"Good."_

"Perhaps _I want to fuck you instead. It is our wedding night." Will rubs noses with Hannibal, a little self-consciously. "Perhaps we should start out equals. One for you, one for me."_

_"Like the New Year's Eve tradition, begin the year the way you want it to go on. Interesting idea."_

_"Is it?"_

_"Yes," Hannibal murmurs softly against him, kissing him open-mouth, Will can feel him getting hard against his thigh, and he's sure Hannibal can feel him._

_"How?"_

_"How do you want to take me?"_

_Will thinks, exaggeratedly stroking his stubble._

_"Lay down on your stomach."_

_Will leans over his husband's back to kiss down his spine, very gently over the angry red of the Verger seal, then down, down...hearing the anticipated gasp as he begins eating Hannibal out, expertly, thanks. This Will can do._

_This he's done before, maybe not to Hannibal very much, yet. To women. But it's the same. Or judging by Hannibal's near instantaneous reaction when he does it, it's pretty close. Hannibal arches, pressing his hips back harder against Will's mouth, pants, clutching a pillow tightly in his arms. Will is quite pleased that his skills are apparently as good as he remembered them to be._

_He's heard Hannibal moan while he's fucking him and while he sucks Hannibal's cock, but the way he sounds when Will eats him out touches something low in his hips and it's_ different _somehow. It's helpless, overcome, and it gets Will so hard, every time, without fail._

_Will sticks his middle finger in his mouth, then gently, carefully, he begins sinking it into Hannibal, who tenses momentarily in response, then moans again, that beautiful defenseless moan that Will is beginning to love. Emboldened by it Will begins to press a little further inside with each stroke in, pull a little further back with each stroke out._

_"Is that alright, baby?" he asks, softly, low in his throat. It's not just dirty talk—he's not completely confident in his ability to judge yet, and Hannibal is unlikely to speak up to say something hurts._

_"Yes..." Hannibal whispers hoarsely. "More..."_

_Will runs the nails of his free hand down the sensitive skin of Hannibal's inner thigh, amused. "'More?' That's not very romantic."_

_"Am I expected to romance you every time until we're old and gray? I had planned on fucking you a lot over the years. It may become tedious."_

_"Stop bitching, it's our wedding night."_

_"Darling dearest, my husband, my one and only,_ please..."

_"I'll do you one better."_

_Will winces at the cold lube, and runs his slick hand up between Hannibal's thighs, moving to kiss the back of his neck, Hannibal breathes hard as Will begins to rock the head of his cock over him, rubbing against his hole, desperately turned on by the anticipation. To make it easier Will pushes Hannibal's hips flatter to the mattress, leaning straight-elbowed on one arm so he can use the other to guide himself._

_"Oh, oh fuck," Will mutters. He keeps his hand on his cock, thrusting in and out with just the head, trying to control himself. When he can no longer resist, Will pushes forward enters him gradually and the muscles of Hannibal's back tense under him, the little choked gasps._

_"Yes,_ Will..."

_"Fuck..." Will whispers hoarsely, "oh..."_

_Will sinks down, breathes hot against his neck, smelling Hannibal's scent in his long hair on the pillow, tender and loving, kissing Hannibal's ear, sinking into him, sinking into the feeling, his head feels a little light with the champagne buzz, he grabs a handful of Hannibal's hair with his other hand and pulls back, not hard, just so he feels it, Hannibal pushing back on every stroke forward, gasping, his mouth hanging open..._

_Will bites his lip and forces himself to slow, watches his pace in the mental mirror, watches himself unraveling Hannibal Lecter thread by thread, each twist of his hips picking him apart at the seams...the effect is a beautiful state of sweaty dishevelment._

_"You feel good," Will murmurs, he knows Hannibal likes to hear it as much as he does, "you feel...ah..."_

_"Will..."_

_"I love you, I love you, baby, I'm so glad..." Will's thoughts are getting tangled up on the way out of his mouth. "I'm glad I married you."_

_Hannibal chuckles a little, breathlessly. "Likewise."_

_Hannibal has his pride too. Will wants him to understand. He wants Hannibal to know what it means that Will loves him, to feel the way Hannibal makes him feel. He wants Hannibal to love the process, not just the end result, and he wants to bring him to his orgasm, not make him come, not tonight. He wants to explain this to him like this._

_And he is, Hannibal's getting there, his arms wrapped around the pillow tense but not tight, the sounds he's making louder and shorter, Will can feel him tightening, tight around him, closer and closer, bringing him close..._

_"Are you gonna come for me, baby?" Will whispers, trying to hold back himself, wanting Hannibal to go first. Hannibal moans even deeper, but softer,_ yes, yes.

_"You want it, don't you? You want to come," soft and slow, "you want it..."_

_"Ha..ah..." Hannibal's fingers in the sheets, Will's sweat trickling down to his face, Hannibal twists his shoulders so he can watch Will watching him, watch the way fucking him makes Will Graham feel, trying to feel it, trying to feel something, he can, just a little, but...he..._

_"Come on, come for me, Hannibal," Will whispers, fucking him slow and deep._

_Hannibal gasps, and Will smiles and fucks him harder as he comes, one hand between Hannibal's head and the pillow, holding him as he moans, soft and drawn out, grinding his hips up into Will's. "Will...yes..."_

_Will kisses him as he slows, Hannibal's fingers going slack on the pillow, his sounds bringing on the same deep pleasant itch inside himself, he circles his hips up into Hannibal, still hard but almost lazily, trying to keep it going as long as he can, then stiffening and letting his jaw drop softly as it starts, Hannibal turns his face again to kiss the curve of his bottom lip, when Will can look he sees the very gratifying expression of dreamy satiation on Hannibal's face, the pleasure he takes from Will filling him._

_"Are we on equal footing, Mr. Graham?" Hannibal asks eventually._

_"I'd rather it be Lecter, I think. Then I'll be nobility."_

_"William Horace Graham-Lecter. The Lady William Horace—"_

_"The_ Lord, _actually, Hannibal, I think your English still needs a little work—"_

_"How dare you."_

_Will laughs with an absolutely heartbreaking grin on his face, and Hannibal is slain by it, watching his husband laugh._

_"I love you, Will Graham."_

_"You sicken me, you unnatural monster."_

 

"Will."

Will starts up immediately, heart pounding, then sees where he is and who's touching him.

"You didn't wake me for my shift," he protests.

"You were sleeping soundly. I wanted to make sure you had some uninterrupted rest."

Will stretches and groans. "What time..."

"Late afternoon."

Will had fallen asleep as the sky was beginning to lighten ahead of them, and that was already a state or two away from New Mexico. By now...

"Where are we?"

"Maryland."

Will opens his eyes for that. "Maryland? Why? _How?_ Did you take any breaks?" 

"You'll see," is all he'll say.

"You're a lunatic," Will grumbles. Hannibal smiles to himself.

Their destination is a large, new house standing alone on an expansive plot in an adjoining county to Baltimore. The driveway is long and broad. Money.

"Who lives here, Hannibal?"

"A former patient."

Will tries to stretch the stiffness from his legs, unsuccessfully, and brushes himself off, finger combing his hair, as he hurries up the last few feet of driveway behind Hannibal to the front door. Will catches Hannibal appraising him quickly; apparently Will passes inspection, fit to be seen with his own husband.

Hannibal rings the doorbell and a moment later Margot opens the door, breaking into a smile as soon as she sees them.

"Margot, dear," Hannibal says.

"Margot!" Will says, amazed, as she hugs him quickly.

"Oh my God! Come inside!" she calls, already heading deeper into the house, gathering up the more hazardous toys on the floor. She wears a long housecoat-type silk robe over her pajamas; Will recognizes the monogrammed Verger seal. His hand slides unconsciously down Hannibal's back and Hannibal makes contact with him lightly, a reassurance.

"Where's..." Will ventures, trying to take the house in all at once.

"There's plenty of time for that," Margot says, sounding perfectly neutral. She steers them to a very nice leather couch and leaves momentarily to grab the coffee. She returns with Morgan Verger on her hip.

"Morgan, this is Will, and this is Hannibal. They're...your uncles."

"Hello, Morgan," Will says.

Morgan hides his face in his mother's side. Will feels the grin spread across his face irresistibly. He knows without looking that Hannibal is watching him.

"He's shy." Margot deposits Morgan on the rug and gets him started coloring so she can keep an eye on him here, God willing, while they talk.

 _Strange. His father was distinctly lacking in shyness._ Will keeps this thought to himself; Morgan's parentage may be a touchy subject in this house.

Finally they're drinking coffee and sitting back and Hannibal, who has been quiet so far, begins to discuss the situation in New Mexico with Margot, obliquely. Will slumps down in the couch and watches Morgan play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry about the feelings you may be experiencing but just be happy because this basically makes "Honeymoon" officially sort of the prequel to this haha
> 
> stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com
> 
> https://www.patreon.com/stumbleinesuperqueen

**Author's Note:**

> Hello and welcome to Badlands...I was about to say I THINK this is gonna be a long one, but it's already 13,859 words long and 28 pages of single-spaced 12pt Times New Roman (gets me in essay mode lol) so I guess it's already long as fuck. I really wanted to finish and edit it all first but I can't hold out, so I'm gonna start posting bits as I firm them up. I think it's going to be a very slow process tho lol.
> 
> I really hope you like this one because I'm seriously loving writing this. It's just flowing (most of it) and it's such a fun and challenging thing to be writing something this long, I think it's probably the longest piece i've ever written.
> 
> "Badlands" is a working title btw. It's cuz of the movie, you know. Charlie Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate etc.
> 
> Please please please comment and pretty please check out my Tumblr!!! stumbleine-superqueen.tumblr.com


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